Anyone using their home data center to support their own business? If so why and what does your setup look like?
Background:
So I have a giant homelab with 400tb flash, 1.1pb HDD, 3.5tb ddr4, 160 cores, 4 3090's, 40gb and 10gb network, dual isp's, pfsense, etc.. I'm using this for big data on the scale of common crawl and plan on setting up a business around it. If I had revenue coming in I could justify moving it to a local colo with 10gb unlimited bandwidth for $1,500 a month. If I had $15k coming in, than $1,500 for a colo is obvious, but with no revenue that's just wasting money every month that could be spent on hardware. Right now electricity (including cooling) and ISP cost is about $500 per month.
My frame of reference:
Folks in r/homelab will have setups ranging from a single machine running plex to a 42 u cabinet running a bunch of k8s instances that replicate work environments. Folks in this sub such as myself will often have large amounts of hardware for a more specific purpose outside of what homelab people do. I'm trying to get an understanding of if anyone is using their home data center to support their own business which has real paying customers.
Questions for anyone using there home data center to support their own business or as the primary for someone else's.
- What does your setup look like? Was it a series of small upgrades or did you drop a giant chunk of money all at once?
- Why are you running it out of your home and not a data center? Did you have it in one and than decided to move it to your house, do you have it at your house and are considering moving it just not yet, or is it something else entirely?
- What made you decide to avoid or use minimal cloud infrastructure and keep it in your home DC?
Any other wisdom you want to impart to on me?
Thanks in advance.
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