Don't sell space in your homelab (2023)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Access & Infrastructure Gatekeeping

  • Some commenters couldn’t read the article due to Spanish league–driven blocking of Cloudflare/CDNs, cited as an example of the risk of putting much of the web behind a few intermediaries.
  • Others added examples (e.g., Imgur blocking VPNs) as collateral damage from large providers’ abuse-prevention policies.

Who Would Even Pay for a Homelab?

  • Many argue no “serious” business will rely on a stranger’s home server, leaving three main customer types: hobbyists, bad actors, and friends.
  • Hobbyists either self-host (it’s the hobby) or use cheap VPS/cloud; people with money prefer professional hosts.
  • Some niche demand exists (e.g., game servers, GPU workloads, residential IP scraping), but it’s limited and often already served by specialized providers.

Legal, Security, and Ethical Risks

  • Strong concern about liability if someone uses your box for piracy, cybercrime, scraping protected sites, or controversial political content.
  • People describe datacenter raids where entire racks or drives are seized; intuition is that a house looks riskier and more vulnerable than “a real business.”
  • Several note the moment outsiders live on your hardware, you inherit ugly content and support burdens.

Economics vs Professional Hosting

  • After hardware, electricity, ISP, and a platform’s cut, it’s hard to beat $4–$5/month VPS from established providers.
  • GPUs may be an exception: some claim a single high-end GPU can bring in ~$100/month; others report it’s not reliably profitable.
  • Distributed/orchestrated approaches (BOINC-style) are discussed, but most think the numbers still don’t work at scale.

Indirect / Lower-Risk Models

  • Renting out encrypted, sharded storage via networks like Storj is seen as one of the few sane models: low exposure, no public IP, modest income that can offset one’s own backup costs.
  • Similar options for compute are rare or crypto-adjacent and viewed with skepticism.

Homelab as Hobby vs Business

  • Several people emphasize that turning a hobby into a business brings SLAs, support, and tax issues that quickly drain the fun.
  • Hosting for friends, for free and with explicit “no guarantees,” is widely seen as acceptable; anything beyond that starts to look like running a real business from home.