Just thinking out loud here. I don’t know too much about starting my own business, but I have a pipe dream about having a side gig building on-site mini servers for clients who want to start their own businesses.
I could speak with the client, find out what type of business they’re developing, then pair them up with FOSS applications and hardware they’d run on their property. I could also update it all remotely. It would be like a plumber/electrician that can show people how to manage the tools I bring to them.
I was thinking of doing this as a really small personal business, meeting with the clients and installing systems for them.
You think there’s a market for something like this? I don’t really have anyone in my circle who knows the business or tech side of this.
Might be better standing a k8s setup and then offering to host and route the small businesses.
Have a bunch of standard services and spin them up as required for the company: db, object storage, web server, standard CMS with free templates, cache and mq.
Needs Drupal plus postgres? Two containers. They want WordPress? Add that.
Needs cache? Add them to your redis instance and charge.
Message bus? Rabbitmq
Object storage? Minio in front of everything so that you can plug it into the cheapest S3 buckets.
Main work is ingress and routing via nginx containers, but it will be cheap enough for you to host and scale as requirements change.
You build a couple of connectors for Auth and payment processing and you can charge a bit extra for that integration.
Most of that can sit in a small k8s 3 node cluster and could probably host a lot of sites with autoscaling.