[flukus]

Depends on what "taking off" means for the start up too. Taking off at a mass consumer scale might need that flexibility, taking off and even getting to market saturation in a specific B2B might be achievable on a raspberry pi level hardware. There are many more of the later.

[xur17]

Agreed - 1gbps is a surprising amount of bandwidth, you could easily host a fairly popular mobile app, saas, etc with plenty of breathing room. And in a lot of cases, you can just move your static file hosting behind Cloudflare, or onto something like s3, and give yourself even more room to grow.

[bauruine]

And even if you only use 500Mbit/s it's more than 3k$ in cloud egress fees saved.

[jedberg]

Any business that you can run from a home server with a residential business line is not the kind of business we are talking about here. Yes, you can potentially serve a lot of customers with that setup, but your reliability story is terrible so you better have very forgiving customers.

What if your internet goes out? Even with a business line, I've had to wait five days for them to replace a fiber line that a squirrel chewed through.

What if the power goes out? I just had a five hour power outage. Even if you have a battery backup, when the neighborhood power is out for a while, the ISP equipment will die when its batteries go out.

What if your hardware dies and you aren't home to switch it out, assuming you even have spare hardware?

What if your A/C goes out and your server overheats and has to get shut down?

All of these are things you usually don't have to deal with when using the cloud or even a $5 VPS, because they design for all of these failure cases from the start.

If you're running a business from your house, it is by definition a lifestyle business, and that's not really what we are talking about here.

[JohnBooty]

    Any business that you can run from a home server 
    with a residential business line is not the kind 
    of business we are talking about here.

What kind of business are we talking about here? What does the "taking off" in your previous post mean, exactly?

Depends on what you're trying to do.

You are not going to be able to run a Netflix competitor out of your garage.

You're not going to get high availability without some significant investment and even then you'll be at the mercy of whatever your ISP is doing upstream in the event of a power outage. I live in an area where we average something like 99.99% power uptime, but not everybody is so lucky.

You could, potentially, host something that serves up something non bandwidth-intensive to tens of thousands of users, give or take an order of magnitude. (SaaS, APIs, etc) You can do a lot of interesting things with a homelab and some of them are potentially profitable.

Perhaps more crucially: you're not exactly locked in to a homelab. You can start with that and once you reach a certain point, migrate to colo or cloud.

[blibble]

over the last 15 years my residential internet and power supply have been considerably more reliable than us-east-1

[sgarland]

The only realistic concern for me here is the ISP failure. Even then, if I really wanted to I could have both AT&T and Spectrum uplinks with an LACP bond.

I have enough battery backup to run my rack for about 30 minutes, more if I shut down a node. That’s more than enough time for me to set up my generator and route power; it has an extended gas tank and can power the rack, fridges/freezers, fans, etc. for over 24 hours. I periodically run drills on this to ensure it’s doable, and that the gear works as expected.

If I’m not home, then yes, the latter would fail. Dual hardware failure is an unlikely scenario; single node failure is handled between K8s and Proxmox clustering.