by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-29 08:47:24+00:00
If I am being honest, My father is in the broadband/bandwidth business where I live and I recently told him about the fact that I was thinking of opening up a simple cloud/extremely low cost (in hardware)/mini datacenter or just thinking about it/tinkering with the software sides of these things (proxmox,incus a lot more) and all and he was interested in converting his office into a rack and he can get a lot of static ips and power supply so I was thinking something about this workflow as I had thought about it and the biggest problem to me seems to be the hardware

He is really excited for this project, he brought me newspaper clippings the other day showing that my idea has potential and other things so that's nice and I have given him the task to get his contacts in our small city for hardware, auctions and rents and try to get more information about some cheapped out specs starting out as I don't want us to invest in with a lot of hardware/investment up front but rather reinvesting the profits and maintaing a clear transparency.

Do you think we should postpone this idea till 3-4 years (I am thinking so) honestly because I would love to build my own software and I am thinking that within these years I can try more pain points of other providers and build a list of the nice features I like (If you know of any, please let me know as well as I still am making the list)

I am not trying to achieve AI purposes at all but rather simple compute (even low-end compute starting out)

Power consumption comparison isn't that much of an issue I think

Honestly I am thinking that we should wait out this cycle of rising hardware so that the hardware prices can go down in the start of the next cycle but I am interested if NUC's would be good enough for my workflow as I can redirect my father more about it because I am not that expertised about the hardware side of things so much so I would really appreciate it if you can tell me more about it/what could be the best use cases for that?

I saw from your article that chic-fil-a uses intel nucs to run their kubernetes clusters so I am assuming that it can be good enough for my use case as well?

Also, there is no guarantee that I end up doing it and its still more so an idea than anything and as I would probably do some projections to see if its worth it and a lot of other things before we get ourselfs some basic cheap equipment to even start and If we do we would probably start out with homelabbing equipment itself but just to be more clear, storage compactness isn't that big of a worry starting out as I think his office is good enough.

Honestly right now, In my understanding Ram Prices are the ones which extremely kill the project and makes me want to reconsider the software side of things (to build things myself/learn more) for a few years so that we can then build the hardware. I think this is the way to go but talking to my father and he was super excited about it I am not exactly sure but still it might give him a few years of his spare time to be more familiar with the hardware side of auctions etc. that he can find us better deals etc. too so please share any advice that you (or anyone) has about it as I would love sharing it down to my father so he that can do some queries about somethings in the local markets / his contacts as well.