Please Don't Sell Space in Your Homelab
Hanging out in subreddits like /r/homelab, /r/servers, and /r/datahoarder, I see this question asked too many times:
I have extra space in my home server, how can I sell this for other people to use?
My answer (and a lot of other people’s answer): don’t.
We’re Really Not Trying To Ruin Your Dreams
If you come across this post, or if this was sent to you, know that we aren’t doing this for the sole purpose of ruining your day. We tell you this because playing with other people’s services and money introduces a host of potential issues, stuff that a lot of people aren’t able to solve on their own.
Personally, I work for a medium sized hosting company in their support department, so I see the challenges we have to solve every day. Challenges that you have to solve for your idea to work and not open you up to a ton of legal risk.
I promise I’m not trying to gatekeep, but if you have to ask for basic help in a forum, you won’t be able to solve these challenges.
Why It’s A Bad Idea
When you go down this road, you have a ton of challenges you have to solve. If you play with other people’s data and money, you’re going to have to solve nearly all of these problems.
Before You Even Start
- You’ll need hardware - “But I already have a server!” you yell into your screen. No, you’ll need more. If you have your customers on one server and it fails, what now? Do your customers just sit offline for a week while you build a new server?
- You’ll need better internet - Your residential ISP isn’t going to be OK with you doing this. You’ll need a business class connection at a minimum and preferably one with lots of bandwidth. Also, what’s your plan if this fails for a few days?
- You’ll need public IPs - You need to be in possession of a public IP for all your customers, because hosting customers aren’t happy with CG-NAT. ISPs will sell these to you, but at a cost.
- You’ll need a better location - Your basement isn’t a very good datacenter. Business want their stuff in places with redundant power, backup generators, higher priority on the power grid during outages, redundant fiber into the building, fire suppression, tight physical security, etc.
- You’ll need legal protection - We’ll dig into this more, but depending on what your customers do there may be legal risk for you.
- You’ll need a way to bill people - If you collect money, you’ll need tax registrations, business filings with your locality, bank accounts to collect fees, invoicing and billing software, etc. All very much in the realm of possible but more chores for just a few dollars per month.
- You’ll need to figure out how much to charge - The services you’re competing with have this down to a science and can be quite cheap. If you go against them, you’ll need to understand how much you need to charge to break even and understand what your customers would be willing to pay for what you’re offering.
- You’ll need remote access - If you sell someone a VPS, they will need to install an operating system, reboot it, and manage certain things offsite. Sure, you can do this for all your customers by hand, but this won’t scale past a few customers. You’ll need a way for them to log in and manage or troubleshoot things.
- You’ll need good insurance - And probably a good lawyer. You’re running a business now so you need to ensure that you’re protecting yourself and your personal assets in case things go very wrong.
Scary Stuff
Those legal protections I mention? Not optional.
Depending on the law, people doing these things might cause your ISP to drop your connection or (worse) land you in legal trouble. You need to have plans on how to mitigate these issues (if you can), and have appropriate legal experts make sure you aren’t opening yourself up for prosecution.
Also, this is just stuff I’ve seen at my job.
- People launching DDoS Attacks - You have a cheap server with a cheap internet connection, why not use it for some help in a DDoS Attack?
- Torrents or pirating - A seedbox would be a nice addition to your homelab after all.
- Proxies for other things - Customers might use your IP to proxy all sorts of weird and nasty traffic. This lands you in hot water with sites that track down your IP.
- Crypto - Sure, you might have 20 NFT’s of weird looking primates, but are you accounting for all your customers using all their allocated CPU all the time? If you over provision to make more money, this will impact all your other customers.
- Very Illegal Things - Things that require trigger warnings and obviously violate a ton of laws. If you don’t have the right boxes ticked, legally speaking, this can land you in prison.
Let’s not mention the fun privacy laws too! Do your customers host any data for people in the EU, Canada, or California? Process any payments on their site? Congratulations! You now get to comply with all these laws that also come with fines!
- GDPR - Company ending fines if you screw this one up.
- CCPA - California privacy laws.
- PIPEDA and CPPA - For our friends up North
- PCI - Security related to payment cards.
These also come with some added benefits like mandated controls in your new company, mandated reported, third-party audits, etc.
One thing to keep in mind too is seizure. If your customer is doing illegal things and attracts the attention of any three-letter government agencies, they’ll come take your server (and probably other things). Feds have raided datacenters and taken servers used in things like botnets, and they probably don’t care too much that your other customers share hardware.
Now That You’re Running
So you’ve passed the first gauntlet and set up your service. Neat! Now let’s run a successful hosting operations:
- You need support - Sure, this may be just you, but you need someone dedicated during the work day to help customers in case they have problems.
- Your customers will blame you for everything - Speaking from experience, hosting customers tend to like to blame the hosting provider. Be ready to deal with people pointing fingers at everything but their bad code.
- Backups and disaster recovery - What happens if one drive fails? Or all of them? Do you have backups you can restore quickly? What about fires or floods? Ransomware?
- On-Call - If you have customers that expect certain uptime levels, being down overnight because you’re asleep isn’t an option. You’ll need to be available or have someone be available to help them.
- Hardware Upgrades - Customers might not want to run their apps on a 10 year old processor. Do you have money set aside to upgrade things?
- Uptime and Reliability - Your customers likely expect a high level of service, so you need to work to maintain that level of trust. Business customers especially don’t like wasting money, or even feeling like they’re wasting money.
Oh, and Security
This deserves it’s own section because I cannot downplay how crucial this is going to be. Customers are going to run unpatched and insecure apps on your servers and a few of them are probably going to get hacked. It happens, literally, every day.
Isolation
The first thing is isolation. Not only do you need to keep this all isolated from the rest of your house, you need to keep your customers isolated from each other. Customers are going to run unpatched and vulnerable software and get hacked, so it’s crucial that one customer doesn’t have the ability to compromise the entire virtual host or other machines.
You also have to be very aware of the speculative execution issues lots of processors recently had, because those have a very real and direct effect on setups like this. Those problems can leak customer data between their VMs.
Also, containers are likely out of the question. If you give your customers root (which you probably will if you host things as a VPS), it’s possible to break out of a container and move into the host system. It’s not something that is trivial, but configuration problems can make it a pretty low hurdle.
Patches and 0-Days
Keeping your setup updates is now mandatory. Every piece needs to always be up to date, because a small foothold is all it takes for someone to gain entry.
Your customers are also going to hound you for every CVE that hits the news, even if you aren’t affected. You’ll need to review them and either update things quickly or let them know you aren’t vulnerable.
If you are vulnerable and something gets compromised, hopefully the isolation you setup keeps it contained to a single customer. If, say, you get your entire host hit with a crypto locker and no backups, that’s the end of your journey.
Customer Data
You also now have data for your customers and your customers’ customers in your equipment. Encryption at rest is mandatory, at a minimum.
This is also where those fun privacy laws kick in, because you may be on the hook for damages caused by lost or stolen customer data.
Wrapping Up
Please don’t sell space in your home server.
Some arguments can be made that by setting low expectations or hosting stuff like game servers you can work around these issues, but the vast majority of them still remain. Things like security need consideration regardless of what you host.
If you’re set on using up extra CPU cycles, here are some options:
- Host more of your stuff - Maybe you do need that extra media server or a seedbox.
- Host stuff for friends - Friends are different because you probably trust them. A lot of the issues of customers taking advantage of you are mitigated by being friends.
- Donate CPU cycles - Projects like BOINC and Folding@Home let you run workloads for academic research that can help other people too.
- Downsize - I know it’s hard to talk about, but if your quad CPU, 2TB RAM monster can’t run because it’s too expensive and you need the money, get something smaller that’s better suited for your workloads.