HACKER Q&A
📣 igammarays

Any bootstrappers hosting their own server from home?


As a solo bootstrapper, I wonder if hosting my own server on a beefed-up home internet connection and static IP-address might actually save me money and time in the long run. My app is Postgres-intensive, lots of external API calls, and some headless Chrome browser scraping.

- Having my server next to me is fun.

- I can buy dedicated hardware for the price of a 5 months of hosting on the cloud providers. A one-time investment of $1000 will buy me a 16 GB Mac Mini M1. Equivalent hardware would cost $200/month on DigitalOcean with backups, and yet still wouldn't have the same CPU performance as Apple Silicon.

- With the ability to connect a monitor and debug production workloads in more intimate detail, I might be able to optimize Postgres and the rest of my stack to really push the limits of performance. Instead of scaling horizontally, I can scale vertically, probably forever (my startup is unlikely to ever handle millions of reqs/second or a petabyte of data).

- My service is non realtime. A few hours of downtime here and there won't hurt. It's a cron-job service which just needs to run "eventually" within a day.

- Since my service is heavily reliant on external APIs, I can maximize outgoing network redundancy with Speedify or other connection multiplier (over LTE, VPNs, etc.)

Main questions:

- How do I achieve redundancy on incoming requests with only 1 static IP address? Outgoing network is easy to multiplex with an LTE backup, etc., but I don't know how to build redundancy for incoming requests.

- What else should I look for?

  👤 leobg Accepted Answer ✓
Thought about that, too. But then I saw that I can get a server at Hetzner’s server auction (not their cloud!) cheaper than what I’d pay for electricity alone. I’m in Germany, so things might be different for you if your rates are cheaper.
👤 pipthepixie
I used to run Nextcloud locally, and could open it up on phones, tablets, etc. But I recently stopped using it, since it's no different than SFTP (Nextcloud just has a web UI to manage / view files and looks nice is all).

I got a NAS device hacked once, and watched people try to copy my stupid .MP4s/.MKVs off it, which is strange since all that's readily available on the web anyway. They were probably looking for sensitive info, but there wasn't any lol.