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.

1. 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?
2. 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?
3. 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.

I download about 500tb of data per month using dual 1gbps connections and pfsense running on an old i7-3770k. I'm typically making 1k+ connections per second; 80% outbound get request, 20% inbound through tailscale tunnels from 10 budget VPS's.

I just upgraded my residential connection an 8gbps connection and am about two weeks out from adding another 8gbps connection. I have a combination of 10gb and 40gb connections between my servers.

Based on some reddit research I figured out that pfsense doesn't work well for 10gb L3 switching and that I need to migrate to TNSR or maybe Vyos(less preferred as I prefer GUI).

I'm trying to figure out what a decent setup would be based on my work load? I'm assuming like a xeon D1541 or any lga 3647 would be fine. Just not sure what is the best route to go, DIY 2U build or some dell/hpe setup which is hopefully cheap (less than $500). Any thoughts or suggestions?

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p.s.Before anyone says anything, I have been downloading these large amounts of data for years out of my house and have never got a single warning message from an ISP. This server will be going into a sound deadening cabinet which i picked up for cheap and is where my 1.5pb of hdd and flash live, so ideally a 1U or 2U build to conserve space.