Home data center or how to start without a penny

You are young, ambitious, full of strength and ideas, and ready to turn the whole World! But as a rule, all good undertakings always end on the most banal - there are no means for their implementation. Investors are ready to invest money in your project, but they need to prove “both your viability and the viability of your project”. And, having a bag of ideas and nothing behind you, there is a high probability that in “You won’t believe”. How to start without starting capital?

Project concept

First of all, a concept should be developed: What is the project, Primary objectives, Target audience, Monetization methods.

An example of my project. I omit the introduction associated with the title and the highlight of the project.

The following is an approximate description: the project represents a complex of services for housewives. Target audience: Women 20-45 years old, usually sit at home with children. What do they need? Their interests are:

Firstly, to give a set of tools to provide up-to-date information on interests, as a rule, these can be RSS feeds from other sites.

Secondly, they need to communicate with each other: chat, forum, messenger, blogs.

Thirdly, they need a means for expressing self-realization: blogs, photo albums.



It is necessary to cover information on the headings: Home and Family, Beauty and Health, Shopping, Divorces and how to survive loneliness, Business woman.

Financial component of the project

This is the main section for investors. There should be two sections: Expenses and Revenues.

The expenditure part has two components, one-time expenses: (purchase of servers)

and permanent: rent of servers and channels (hosting or collocation), c / n staff (content managers, project support, moderators)

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Income: Possible income (depending on attendance)

• from placing banners,
• from contextual advertising
• from attracting partners to advertise their services
• announcements of new products and services in the form of custom articles.
• Other project features: gifts, cards ...

Project prototype

The most important thing is to provide the investor with a prototype of the working draft. If the project is not large and fits within the framework of sharing hosting, this is not a problem. If the project is ambitious, designed for high load and represents a distributed cluster of servers, then as an option it is the organization of your own home data center. The project should “breathe” in your hands and “come to life” in the eyes of investors.



Undoubtedly, before implementing a project, it is necessary to negotiate the tariff with the provider, find out the bandwidth of both incoming and outgoing traffic, and of course there must be a dedicated IP address. While my traffic is 15 Mbit traffic.



The architecture of the project is designed in such a way that in the event of a “take-off” of the project, it could be safely spread to several servers. Each functional unit has its own subdomain. However, the architecture of the project is a separate topic of another blog.



One of the possible layout of the project servers is shown in Figure 1.

Server 1 is a proxy server and WEB. Server 2 is a database server, which must be in the same local network with Server 1 (black). Server 3 is a scripting server, it runs various badraundovskie scripts that search for information on the Internet and process user content. Ideally, Srver 3 should have a separate Internet access, but “for bezrybe and cancer fish.” Server 3 connects via a home router, and of course my laptop, both the developer’s server and my wife’s computer, is connected via the same router.

Costs and iron

Laugh, but the servers are almost garbage, but they perform their function.

• Server 1 - P-IV / 2200MHz / 2Gb (single core) - donated by a friend,
• Server 2, P-III / 800MHz / 512Mb - at the time regretted to throw out.
• Server 3, P-III / 800MHz / 512Mb - gave a gift at work (they were going to throw it out too).

To date, the costs are:

one-time:

domain registration 650 rubles,

two network cards 220 x 2 = 440 rubles

memory upgrade - 1500 rub



Variables:

tariff increase + 500 rubles



As you can see, even a beginning businessman programmer can quite afford such costs.

State of affairs and possible outcome of events

• sell for a million bucks (joke, rubles, but then a couple). It is possible, but for this project must be 100% completed and already collect some money.
• find a co-investor, which is most likely. Options are being considered. Especially it will be necessary to pour in finances in the first stage after launching the promotion (I don’t even know how much).
• Finishing the project yourself in the evenings is not the best but quite possible option. All profits are yours, but there is a big risk of “not taking off” at all.

Today there is a breathing prototype with 35% of the implemented functionality. After finalizing the design, the project can be opened in principle.



and so: The one who does nothing is not mistaken

and the one who does not risk does not drink champagne