My SaaS Journey from $1000/Mo Heroku to Home Server

I like that you're planning on doing this. I think you'll have a good time reading these links.

* https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-scooter-computer/ ↗

* https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-elses-computer/ ↗

Pay some attention to where he mentions "burning in your box"

I really think minipc's are the sweet spot. I run several and they are amazing for the cost. They run circles around cpu/memory/disk io you'll get at heroku or digital ocean. The cheaper smaller minipc's will run circles around any pi as well.

I run a couple of morefine m600 r9 7940hs ($520) with 1TB ssd and ($100) 64GB of ram ($200). If you look for deals you can occasionally score big (usually during holidays).

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3747vs5454/Intel-i7-10700-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-7940HS ↗

I'd say this, if you're serving "from home" I'd make sure you've got a fiber connection and that you're not behind a nat. It's actually not expensive to get fiber and a block of public ip addresses where I live, but you should check into that.

Also, I would absolutely buy a ups ....actually buy 2. One specifically for your networking set up and another for your box. Cheap insurance if you ask me. I'd honestly only start off maybe hosting your staging server. Figure out what the latencies are like, how you're going to do data backups, and OS updates, etc and all the other digital lawn mowing activities first.

Many small businesses used to do exactly what you 're doing, but there's risk involved. I do think the sweet spot is collocation, but if you're ok with the risks have at it. You'll learn a lot and many others have done it.

Most residential ISPs forbid commercial use.

Many residential ISPs won't give you a static IPv4 address.

Most residential ISPs won't give you sufficiently symmetrical bandwidth.

VM hosting companies have spare hardware on hand, and can generally shift you either transparently or with minimal downtime to different hardware.

If none of these things are an issue for you, go ahead.

Personally, I wouldn't use RPi hardware, EVO 970s, 2TB spinners, or a Fortigate.

Four boxes, each with a 12 core CPU, 64 GB RAM, a 2TB NVMe with at least a 1200TBW lifetime, and a pair of 4-8 TB spinners in RAID1. One box runs staging including workers, one runs production including workers, one runs all your firewall, utility, administration and backups, and the fourth is configured and powered off -- once a month, power it up, bring it up to date, and shut it down. Someday you will need it as a spare or for capacity. Get extra NICs for all of them.

I would estimate $5K in hardware costs. Buy an online UPS and connect the production and utility boxes to it.

I love the spirit of this! Like other have said, moving away from Heroku to a dedicated server that's already hosted would also be a win. Even on-demand AWS EC2 instances may be cheaper than your dynos.

I'd personally still lean towards a service where I could get a VM or dedicated box so I could keep internet access and power off my mind. That said, installing at a colo could be a good middleground for "bring your own" hardware, but power and internet included.

It's hard to say without knowing the nature of your SaaS because that can dictate risk tolerance and SLAs, but I'd run the costs on what the upside is vs the potential of an issue and what the cost of those issues are.