It's a good idea in general to run a privet cloud. I have been playing with an idea in my had that would make it profitable too, without charging subscription, which is notoriously difficult to do.

Rather then hardware solution, a VPS image solution would be best. A VPS image with core email, web, and file services, and an easy way to add more as needed.

We really need to decentralize the web again before we start connecting to the world wide google or the world wide facebook :)

The recent closure of reader really damaged googles reputation in eyes to the point were I can believe this story completely. It almost feels like they switched their slogan from "do no evil" to "do at least a little evil every day, just for the fuck of it!"