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Are there easy services out there that let you mail them a hardware server and they will host it in their rack? Never heard of doing this on a server-by-server

Are there easy services out there that let you mail them a hardware server and they will host it in their rack? Never heard of doing this on a server-by-server basis... But I'm also not a DevOps guy :P

corobo 10y ago
Standard colocation. Used to be the thing all the kids did before the cloud.
seanp2k2 10y ago
As someone who previously worked in an ISP / webhosting datacenter and now sees most younger devs as people who don't actually know how their stuff runs ("it's in the cloud"), this is an amusing comment. "The cloud" is just marketing on top of shared hosting and virtual private servers. Those things have been around for decades. At the end of the day, your code is still executing on some poor Xeon out there, but maybe it's using some kernel features to restrict memory access and you deploy it using a fancy whale with a shipping container. We've had LXC, cgroups, jails, and xen for many years as well (LXC was 2008, Xen 2003). Solaris had zones in ~2004. We have SSDs, DDR4, 10GbE, and 32-core-per-socket Xeons now, so you don't have to really give two shits about crazy amounts of random reads / writes, storing state in 4 separate network-connected nosql systems with REST APIs, 4 layers of reverse proxies, 3 layers of virtualization, and 60-frame-deep call stacks as most stuff just works well enough with little thought put into the systems aspect of it. Despite all of this, Google Sheets is less responsive than the 1985 release of Excel, and takes longer in wall-clock time to enter in 100 rows of integers, then sum up a column. See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law #progress The only thing which is really new is a generation of people who don't understand anything system-related deeper than the first abstraction layer.
- dandelany 10y ago
  I'm well familiar with shared & dedicated hosting, and with colocation as a concept - I guess I've just thought of colo as something only big companies with big budgets and lots of servers do. I like the idea of building a single rack server in my apartment for a project, and mailing it away never to worry about it again. Good points re: abstraction of the deeper system layers though. I guess my position as a frontend developer is that every braincell I spend thinking about things like hardware and memory allocation is one less to spend thinking about the UX of my app. Abstracting layers away is a good thing - except when they leak, which is often...
  - x13 10y ago
    "never to worry about it again" .. i guess this is why i stopped renting a cabinet at level 3 .. when a hard drive dies, who wants to go fix it?

corobo 10y ago

Standard colocation. Used to be the thing all the kids did before the cloud.

seanp2k2 10y ago

As someone who previously worked in an ISP / webhosting datacenter and now sees most younger devs as people who don't actually know how their stuff runs ("it's in the cloud"), this is an amusing comment. "The cloud" is just marketing on top of shared hosting and virtual private servers. Those things have been around for decades. At the end of the day, your code is still executing on some poor Xeon out there, but maybe it's using some kernel features to restrict memory access and you deploy it using a fancy whale with a shipping container. We've had LXC, cgroups, jails, and xen for many years as well (LXC was 2008, Xen 2003). Solaris had zones in ~2004. We have SSDs, DDR4, 10GbE, and 32-core-per-socket Xeons now, so you don't have to really give two shits about crazy amounts of random reads / writes, storing state in 4 separate network-connected nosql systems with REST APIs, 4 layers of reverse proxies, 3 layers of virtualization, and 60-frame-deep call stacks as most stuff just works well enough with little thought put into the systems aspect of it. Despite all of this, Google Sheets is less responsive than the 1985 release of Excel, and takes longer in wall-clock time to enter in 100 rows of integers, then sum up a column. See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law #progress The only thing which is really new is a generation of people who don't understand anything system-related deeper than the first abstraction layer.

dandelany 10y ago
I'm well familiar with shared & dedicated hosting, and with colocation as a concept - I guess I've just thought of colo as something only big companies with big budgets and lots of servers do. I like the idea of building a single rack server in my apartment for a project, and mailing it away never to worry about it again. Good points re: abstraction of the deeper system layers though. I guess my position as a frontend developer is that every braincell I spend thinking about things like hardware and memory allocation is one less to spend thinking about the UX of my app. Abstracting layers away is a good thing - except when they leak, which is often...
- x13 10y ago
  "never to worry about it again" .. i guess this is why i stopped renting a cabinet at level 3 .. when a hard drive dies, who wants to go fix it?