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Colocation: Non-Clown Hosting

176 points by ingve 2y ago

gnabgib 2y ago
Article title: More jabbering from me about non-clown hosting Related post A terrible way to jump into colocating your own stuff (184 points, 1 day ago, 126 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41622653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41622653
blackfur 2y ago
My last experience with colocation hosting was that just the monthly fee was way more than a dedicated server on the same host. It was so confusing and I really want to hear some feedback if anyone else has had a similar experience.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  I sort of had the same experience in that it rapidly got cheaper the more of a rack I wanted, but a single server was just pointless.
- navaati 2y ago
  Yes, that's my biggest "let down" with this writing: at least in my corner of the world (Paris), colo starts at 300€/month for something reasonable, or at the very least 100€ for low power 1U (so you can host... a switch). That's as much as a rent ! On the other hand you can get a nice enough dedicated server for 15€/month. So yeah, if I'm missing something please tell me because I'd love to but I can't justify the price for hobby stuff.
  - cm2187 2y ago
    It depends what you do with it. If you only need a small VM to manage your emails nothing will beat a VPS. But I also use it for offsite backup, so need a bit of storage. When you add dozens of TB, dedicated quickly becomes way more expensive. Particularly given that I tend to park there old hard drives which cost I have already amortised.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      Well, up to a few dozens of TB hetzner will charge you €27 per month for each 22TB hard drive, so it's not that fast that colocation gets better.
      - cm2187 2y ago
        If you buy your drives smartly that's amortised after 8 months. When you are looking at the cost over 5 years, it is hard to beat colocation for specialised hardware.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        I'm ignoring upfront cost here, and going based on the premise of 100€-300€ as the monthly fee for colocation. You can't amortize your way out of that.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    You're not really missing anything. Co-location has never scaled down to 1U very well, because of the overheads - you can't just let trust 40+ customers to slide their 1U server into the same rack without security concerns and/or losing lots of space, and having extra work with power distribution and networking that the customers themselves are responsible for with a full rack. Just access arrangement for 40x more customers adds up in admin overheads, and colocation isn't really a tech play as much as it's a real-estate play similar to parking where the goal is minimum effort rent-extraction with as little staff as possible...
    - jve 2y ago
      We have colo starting from 1U/35€: https://delska.com/services/colocation-rack-rental/ https://delska.com/services/colocation-rack-rental/ - but that is for some non-power hungry <100W device. Then you buy increments of 100W power. Regarding security aspect, as for what customer can do: you can bring your device and put it in shared rack while support personnel accompanies you. Power/Ethernet and if keyboard/screen is needed will be managed/connected/wired only by support staff. One can rent a whole rack if you want dedicated access. And 1/2 or 1/4 racks are available if fullsize is not needed.
      - vidarh 2y ago
        That is making exactly the point I was making: That the price for 1U will tend to not be very competitive with renting dedicated servers (I can rent a server including hosting for that price) because the overheads to the provider of subdividing that 42U rack adds up. The point wasn't that the security can't be dealt with, but that dealing with it is one more thing that contributes to a higher cost per U if you rent 1U than if you rent quarter rack or more.
    - AmericanChopper 2y ago
      A 1U can very easily contain 64+ physical cores, many TB of storage, and a few hundred GB of RAM. A 1U colo can be a great deal if you’re looking to use that much compute/storage. The admin for those arrangements is pretty simple really. Even if you’re providing supervised access, it’s not going to be much work. I run several small colo deployments like this, and I probably only visit the sites every couple of years.
  - consteval 2y ago
    You're better off self-hosting if your needs are small enough you only require a single machine.
- em500 2y ago
  Sounds like simple economy of scale? Same reason why for many things buying brand new can be cheaper than trying to get defects repaired. (I'd assume coloc is more labor intensive for the host.)
- bubblethink 2y ago
  Colo is for racks. It's for businesses. If you just need a single server, you'll be better served by a dedicated server from hetzner, ovh, etc. The only exception I can think of to this is GPUs. If you have your own GPUs and have a legitimate use for them, colo pricing may beat server rentals.
  - coverband 2y ago
    Absolutely my experience as well... Plus your vendor options are reduced since the location has to be somewhere within driving distance for you, or your "caretaker" so that you can replace that flatlined drive with a new one without significant downtime.
  - chipdart 2y ago
    > Colo is for racks. It's for businesses. This blog post mentions parking an old switch with a derpy little raspberry pi. Also, what makes colocation something for businesses is cost. The likes of Hetzner also sells colocation, and nowadays you can buy a used rack for around $100. Moreover, today's COTS computers are not like your parent's. A mini PC selling nowadays for peanuts has gigabit Ethernet, 16GB of RAM and half a dozen or so cores. You'd pay a small fortune for servers with those characteristics in the early 2000s, and nowadays that hardware is used to check emails.
    - navaati 2y ago
      > Hetzner also sells colocation Oooooh, they do ! 120€ for 14U, now we're talking ! It's in Germany of course... I think that indeed my problem here is that I live in too expensive a place, expensive for me, expensive for my servers ><.
      - danielh 2y ago
        Please be aware that this doesn't include electricity and cooling, which is really expensive in Germany. They charge 0.476€/kWh. Running a single 4090 @ 450W 24/7 would add another ~150€/month.
    - 2y ago
- TZubiri 2y ago
  You pay for the privilege of choosing and owning your hardware. Turns out it's cheaper to let the colo facility buy all of the same hardware and have full control to it. Who would have thunk
- toast0 2y ago
  Where I am in the market, the managed dedicated server is 10+ years old, so there's no capital cost there. More upscale, the host may have volume discounts with the OEM that you won't get, unless you've got other business (maybe you buy a lot of laptops for your staff, so you can get servers for less as well) It's got to be cheaper to have me as a customer when I never show up in person, and don't even know precisely where the server is. For a colo, they need to provide me with access, and supervise me when I visit, and put up locking cabinets (and make sure they aren't all keyed alike!), they'd also need to be able to meter power, etc. There's definitely reasons to colo instead as a customer, but usually it's lots of hardware, or specialized hardware, or sometimes if you have networking needs that the host won't accomidate in dedicated; maybe you want to run an ASN and have direct connections to other peers / transit / IX.
- rwmj 2y ago
  Location seems to matter. Back when I was using colocation in Docklands (London area where all the main hosting happens) it was very expensive. ISTR 2U was hundreds per month. I'm guessing Rachel is not paying that for her Raspberry Pi, but maybe not hosting in such a central area.
- bakugo 2y ago
  >just the monthly fee was way more than a dedicated server on the same host What kind of "dedicated server"? When you colocate, you have full control over the choice of hardware, meaning you can stuff 200TB worth of hard drives and 512GB of RAM into a machine and pay a few hundred dollars max for it. Good luck finding someone willing to rent out a dedicated server with those specs for the same price as the colocation.
- justinclift 2y ago
  I guess it kind of depends? As a data point, for two 1U servers co-located in Australia I'm paying about AU$500 per month. If these two servers were low spec, then that would be more expensive than just renting dedicated servers. But I can put whatever spec servers fit in those two rack units, including things with quite a lot of ram, quite a few ssds, 10GbE+ network links, etc. Doing the same thing as that with dedicated servers would be quite a bit more than the AU$500/mo I'm currently spending. --- As a data point for anyone interested, those two servers are running Proxmox and host a bunch of (Linux) VMs that provide online services. Live migration (etc) between them works fine, etc. :)
  - AmericanChopper 2y ago
    If you need something close to the full compute a 1U can offer, then you can definitely get value for money from ordinary colo like that. But you’ll get a lot more value if you need a full or half rack. But if you just need a single VPS it’s not going to add up.
  - abigail95 2y ago
    How much power do you get for that?
    - justinclift 2y ago
      Good question. :) We're using this crowd, and they've been really good: https://www.ransomit.com.au/colocation/ https://www.ransomit.com.au/colocation/ Would recommend. :) I'm not sure how much power is included. They asked for the specs for the servers, which we provided, and they gave us the above quote which we took them up on. That price also includes some extra stuff. An IPv4 /28, and dedicated VPN for the IPMI/iDRAC ports on the two servers. Each 1U server seems to idle at just over 100W, though when they get busy they ramp up to several times that.
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y ago
  > My last experience with colocation hosting was that just the monthly fee was way more than a dedicated server on the same host. Cheap dedicated servers are usually very old and buggy hardware. With colocation, you can actually install some very good server hardware (pick up some good refurbished stuff rather than buying new)
lifeisstillgood 2y ago
I am fairly sure remote working and hybrid working are here to stay. Which means the commercial real estate market is going to shift with more and more “co-working” spaces being created. One thing I wonder is if they will simply turn one office room into a co-low space - where it’s easier to drive to, it’s simpler to manage. Because cloud first is a rubbish solution for most people - just have a server with a TB of disk and most companies can live on that happily running away in the corner. And there might be a growth for companies that have expertise in the basics of racks and HVACs just to run that room for them.
- bpye 2y ago
  I’m sure I’ve heard of this somewhere - where someone is hosting out of a coworking space’s server room - but of course cannot recall where. It’s not surprising I guess, office buildings often(?) have one or multiple server rooms, backup power or generators, maybe even redundant networking.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  I'm in the process of finding where to put $100,000 of 4090s for training non-llm models. It looks like "my garage" is cheaper by far even when I include installing an HVAC system and 3 phase power when I look at yearly costs for a spot with 20kW's of power.
  - isoprophlex 2y ago
    Did you factor in security to avoid the local thug population shopping for some free gpu compute?
    - TZubiri 2y ago
      A gun and some discretion are pretty cheap
      - komali2 2y ago
        You'll sit in the garage with a gun 24/7?
p0w3n3d 2y ago
Thank you very much for the education, the grassroots works. To be honest there is a lot of things nowadays which are covering up easier, cheaper and sometimes better ways which used to be normal. Younger people for example no longer know they can buy their own music or movies. And sometimes they send things from one computer to another using a Dropbox
moomin 2y ago
If CoLo meant I had Rachel Kroll as my sysadmin, I’d regard it as a pretty good deal too. Unfortunately, it means I’d have me.
- krab 2y ago
  That's a pretty much orthogonal issue if you compare dedicated servers to, say AWS EC2. There aren't that many tasks you would have to perform on bare metal that you don't have to do in EC2. PaaS such as Heroku or Vercel, that's another story.
- ur-whale 2y ago
  > Unfortunately, it means I’d have me. Yeah gearheads have a saying for that: first upgrade the driver then upgrade the car.
dannyobrien 2y ago
Related and kinda related links: * In San Francisco, good old MonkeyBrains offers an off-the-menu, In'n'Out-style coloc deal: https://www.monkeybrains.net/colocation.php https://www.monkeybrains.net/colocation.php Fun! If you're thinking of doing this, say so here, maybe we can all share an amp or two. * If you just want to play with something that isn't an Amazon instance, and are not sure you want to commit to a >$50 a month server somewhere, https://lowendbox.com/ https://lowendbox.com/ always has a few crazy deals. * Never underestimate just slinging a box under your desk at the end of a consumer internet connection. I think people sometimes overestimate how difficult it is; I honestly think everyone should do it once, if only to get that visceral feel of being a peer on the global Internet.
- genewitch 2y ago
  > at the end of a consumer internet connection. CGNAT needs to be routed around, which means you need at least a "$5 VPS" with a routable IP address to bastion for you. If you monitor the word "wifi" on social media it's a pretty decent proxy for where CGNAT is prevalent. Used in a sentence, "we just got wifi at the new house." I've written a couple guides on this and subjects like it; i've had to use squid in a datacenter to forward proxy my lightning detector at the house, otherwise it would never receive a heartbeat - even though it would auth and start trying to send data; i've bypassed CGNAT so i could host console "co-op" games (diablo III, for example); and i've "mirrored" my phone media sync to a colocated server as well, just to avoid trying to route around (triple?) CGNAT to my synology at home.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Tailscale funnel will let you expose a service to the world without a $5 VPS.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      ipv4 space and bandwidth cost non-zero dollars so I'd ask "who is paying and why?" I'm understand that a significant portion of HN is on fiber or whatever, but not everyone has access to fiber, cable, or even - dare i speak it - DSL. CGNAT was mentioned as being prevalent in the UK and germany almost 6 years ago (for example.) I haven't had a non-cgnat ISP the entire time i've lived in Louisiana, and not for lack of trying. (at&t, t-mobile, at&t fixed wireless (x2!), starlink) I'm not paying >$5/month to solve the problem "but what if i want to self host a public service" to switch to business or whatever, either, that's ridiculous. edit: also i have colo hardware; i write guides for people who either don't or don't know how. cool if tailscale works. wireguard does too...
renewiltord 2y ago
I’m always interested in a cheap Colo somewhere. Anywhere in continental US is fine. I’ll ship my stuff in, fly there, and set it up and try to make it work without repeat trips. Anyone have any ideas? One of the more crazy ones was that I just buy a home in Utah that’s rural ish to be cheap enough but also near fiber. Hard but there are some options.
- toast0 2y ago
  Webhostingtalk, lowendbox, and lowendtalk should have some options for you. Anywhere with a major internet exchange is likely to have lots of options. If you don't know where those are, you can just look for cities with Equinix locations. Equinix isn't cheap, but some will have a warehouse on the cheap side of town with fiber to Equinix and you can rent a cabinet from them.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Oh surprising. I thought that those sites were for VPS alone. Thank you.
    - toast0 2y ago
      They have everything. Shared hosting, tiny VPS, full sized VPS, managed/dedicated, colo, IP rental, etc.
- dilyevsky 2y ago
  Hurricane Electric has a deal - $600 a cabinet with power and 1gbps transit. Used to be $300…
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Haha it’s funny I posted about that earlier in the day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630783 They even had a $400/halfcab option earlier this year. Pity I didn’t jump on it.
- 2y ago
chris_engel 2y ago
Colocation, I don't know... Without questioning peoples preferences but I think at that point I'd rather look for a decent fiber network connection for my home and let that raspberry run in my own cupboard. I mean, its a RASPBERRY you would probably do fine even without the fiber connection.
- sschueller 2y ago
  It depends what it is. I have 25/25 fiber at home for practically nothing (~70 USD a month) but I can only go so far even with a UPS. If I loose power for too long or my internet goes down I have no backup which I would have at a co-location facility.
  - jbverschoor 2y ago
    A 2200VA/1320W UPS will run a macmini on full load (50watts) for 2 hours. So it's safe to say 12-20 hours under normal load.
  - altairprime 2y ago
    If those circumstances occur, what would you be serving that can't afford to go offline for a couple days? It's important to have an answer to that question, rather than to assume that being offline when your home internet is down is inherently a problem. You can safely estimate using "X nines will cost X digits per month": 1 nines, 36.5 days/year downtime is $#/month. (openwifi tier) 2 nines, 3.65 days/year downtime is $##/month. (residential tier) 3 nines, 9 hours/year downtime; are $###/month. (commercial tier, datacenter tier) 4 nines, 1 hour/year downtime, is $####/month. (datacenter tier) 5 nines, 5 minutes/year downtime, is $#####/month. (carrier tier) Speaking from experience, it's both important to decide which 'nines' you require before you invest in making things more resilient — and it's important to be able to say things to yourself like, for example, "I don't care if it's down 4 days per year, so I won't spend more than $##/month on hosting it".
  - forty 2y ago
    It's always a surprise to me how expensive internet access can be in the US. Here in France 1Gb/700Mb fiber connection costs 30€/month (and this is without commitment and includes TV stuff - "more than 180 channels" whatever that means, and landline phone)
robertclaus 2y ago
I've pretty much always had a raspberry pi running a few services in my basement. I never really considered moving it to some else's property. Interesting to hear it's an option.
krab 2y ago
... and we were doing serverless and build less before it was cool! It was called "shared PHP hosting". :-D
- immibis 2y ago
  It was pointed out recently on HN that Lambda is basically CGI-as-a-service. (CGI being a more language-agnostic spec that operates similarly to PHP)
  - hooverd 2y ago
    The real value-add from Lambda is integration with the rest of the AWS ecosystem. It doesn't even scale up without breaking the bank. But it does scale down to zero. And can process events from EventBridge, DDB, S3, SQS, SNS, and every AWS service under the sun. It's really good at that. If you want to run an API, slap a Go executable on an EC2 or ECS instance.
  - sirsinsalot 2y ago
    Lemme just login to cPanel and check that
DeathArrow 2y ago
I don't know what to say. Not paying big bucks to cloud platforms so they can lock you in and keep your code and data hostage seems undemocratic.
Stem0037 2y ago
While colocation offers greater control and potentially lower costs for high-performance needs, it's worth noting that for many small to medium-sized operations, cloud services can still be more cost-effective when factoring in the total cost of ownership (TCO). This includes not just hardware costs, but also the time and expertise required for maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting. Another one of the primary advantages of cloud services is the ease of scaling. In a colocation environment, scaling up often means purchasing new hardware and physically installing it. How do you address the scalability needs of rapidly growing applications or services in a colocation setup?
- altairprime 2y ago
  While that may be true, it's not relevant in the context of the article. As the final paragraphs indicate, this is about telling people that datacenters exist at all (yes, people don't realize this!) and allow anyone to sign up and host stuff: > If this is old hat to you, great! It means you're probably a grizzled 1990s sysadmin just like me, consarn it! This isn't for you, then. > This is for the newer folks who might not have realized that there's an alternative to paying tribute to one of the three churches of the Clown: M, G, or A. If you want to "get your stuff online", there are other ways... and there always have been! If you don't realize that self-service and managed-tier datacenters exist, you can't properly investigate, calculate, and compare TCO — and certainly the cloud providers aren't going to bring up datacenters unless they have to.
- phamilton 2y ago
  I'd add that cloud services are dramatically cheaper when your application is able to tolerate preemption. Spot pricing in AWS is around $0.015/vcpu/hr. That still going to be more expensive than a dedicated server, but it's much closer. If you have cyclical traffic patterns and other elastic workloads, the gap can be almost non-existent, even without considering personnel.
- sethammons 2y ago
  SendGrid ran our own data centers and scaled massively. Yes, orders to dell took forever and we were often worried if we were going to have enough compute. It worked out to be vastly cheaper than aws but we still moved load into their cloud to help new projects spin up and burst activity. And moving over to managed services eventually became our default, not because it was monetarily cheaper, but because it let teams develop faster.
hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
What a coincidence, I spun up my first VM on DigitalOcean just yesterday for $4 a month. It felt... freeing after a few years of working with the Big Three for various things, big and small. Still a step above schlepping your own hardware, but it was still the cheapest Debian VM I could find by about a factor of 2. (Admittedly, I didn't look too hard, let me know if you know a better one.) https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/common-sense-security-for-ssh-on-a-new-debian-server/ https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/common-sense-...
- fragmede 2y ago
  might I suggest changing the port ssh runs on from 22 to something else in your guide? and imo fail2ban -1 is just a recpie for getting locked out. personally I found the $4 DO droplet underpowered.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
    I've been considering changing the SSH port, just for that extra bit of security. As for fail2ban -1, I just like seeing the Banned IP list slowly engulf the screen over time ;)
    - fragmede 2y ago
      changing the ssh port is also for noise reasons. The number of drive bys on port 22 is insane.
- fellerts 2y ago
  I'd suggest adding ssh-audit to your list. It's literally a tool to harden SSH configs. https://www.ssh-audit.com/ https://www.ssh-audit.com/
  - stavros 2y ago
    This looks good, but unfortunately it doesn't give you the config to fix your setup, it just complains about your curves.
throwaway984393 2y ago
I'm a little less grizzled, but I'm so glad I never have to deal with shuffling around broken hardware anymore, much less diagnosing the most inane, obscure bugs due to the hardware slowly crapping out. I've lost so much sleep to shit hardware and unstable, untrustworthy colos. APIs and automation rather than cage monkeys, IPMI, expect and crossed fingers. The Cloud is my church and I've seen the light, hallelujah.
lbriner 2y ago
We are seriously considering moving downwards from a dedicated server to some kind of BYOD/co-location. 1) Our server is at least 5 years old but you are still paying a high monthly charge. We have probably paid back 5 times its cost already (I know this includes power/air-con etc) 2) Even a recent quote for another 256GB RAM was quoted at $1200 install and $300 PER MONTH! 3) We find that the support are not quite good enough for anything other than the basics. We had a network performance issue that we insisted was something in their infra and they denied it, it was only after I used Wireshark to prove the problem that they finally found it. YMMV of course. 4) We run some test Hypervisors and then only support Windows + Hyper-V (or VMWare on their "cloud"). I don't mind Windows except the monthly Windows updates are very slow and tedious and require VMs to be shutdown. 5) We are getting performance issues because ultimately, each Hypervisor has one disk (might be RAID1) and 10 VMs all writing to it, this seems to have affected throughput, particularly on build agents which write a lot of stuff to disk. On the plus side: 1) We get 24 hour support for major outages, whether caused by them or us. They obviously can't fix anything we have broken but we at least have someone to call if the network seems to have gone down, for example. 2) We can have additional equipment run up reasonably quickly without having to purchase it or go to site. If we move to co-location, we can probably get an amazing server with 4 disks and 1024GB RAM for less than $10K, run Xen or Proxmox on it and get much better performance, although whether they would charge much less is the question. I don't know how many co-loc providers want people with only 1 or 2 servers, I guess they prefer the big corps who want to move 10 racks worth of stuff there.
Neil44 2y ago
People seem to be scared of owning servers. But my experience has been that generally speaking they're very reliable. If it's important you would always want duplicates, fallbacks etc but it's only the same with cloud services - multi region, multi cloud.
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  People spread FUD about running servers because they're scared their careers of complexity and fat margins on cloud services will evaporate.
c0balt 2y ago
Interesting, their definition of managed hosting appears to be quite different from my experience at a provider for managed hosting. We explicitly didn't grant customers "root" access unless they requested it. This both made it easier for us (less cleanup when a customer mucks up the setup) and for some customers)(no easy way to mess up your installation). Most people just wanted a managed deployment of their PHP app, a webshop or WordPress and this worked well.
- kqr 2y ago
  I agree. Managed hosting to me means configuring software and supplying only credentials for limited admin panels, not full server access.
Havoc 2y ago
Let’s be real - if it could run in a raspberry temporarily then a five dollar vps would have been overkill let alone colo
asymmetric 2y ago
Is there a list of colos by country/region somewhere?
kkfx 2y ago
Never underestimate the co-location power of personal homes of employees with their own HVAC, p.v. with storage and FTTH bandwidth: with good compensation to them might be cheaper and better supervised than choosing a third party. Ladies and Gentleman's it's about time to show the real purpose of homelabs and get paid for the ownership instead of paying third parties, it's about time to use modern logistic to work in a decentralized world instead of insisting with the old mainframe model renamed cloud. Imaging this world and how any remote worker in his/her own home could be a single-person company in a thriving society, instead of a flat+vertex one where most own nothing and smile like Canon workers in China https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/17/22538160/ai-camera-smile-recognition-office-workers-china-canon https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/17/22538160/ai-camera-smile-...
- arkh 2y ago
  You're making me think: communal Kubernetes cluster. You setup your nodes at home and share them with some people to make a cluster. The main problem would be securing secrets and data or you'd have to limit yourself to things you don't mind being public.
  - kkfx 2y ago
    No need to imitate giants, meaning there is no reason to use k*s. We have declarative systems like NixOS and Guix System, there is no need to use paravirtualization, who is born for commercial reasons: selling ready made stuff to those who do not know at a price you can't sell for a snippet of nix/scheme. A company can simply develop their own decentralized infra, hosted by their employees. If it will need more it will also have money to buy sheds with p.v. and storage with good enough fiber links to have their own small datacenters.
    - arkh 2y ago
      I was thinking more of a cooperative operation. So people could totally join and quit on a whim and I think k8s would help with automatically moving your app were there is available resources.
sangnoir 2y ago
Why are colocation providers reluctant to have clear pricing on their websites? Most of them have some form of "Contact us for a quote" link. I get their target market is B2B, but the additional friction probably prevents many colo-curious homelab operators from making the jump.
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y ago
  Anyone that doesn't have clear pricing doesn't want the colo-curious homelab crowd. Many colo companies won't do less than a full rack.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    The weird thing is some do publish the price of 1U/1 Amp along with half-racks and full racks, and nothing in between - not even a formula to estimate costs if one doesn't nearly fall into one of those buckets. The 1U pricing suggests that some do care about 1U collocation, while simultaneously limiting price information to quote requests for a 2U or an 800W 1U. It's strange.
weinzierl 2y ago
While we are at non-clown hosting and others suggesting smaller, alternative hosting options: Is there a hoster that offers hard pricing caps or maybe prepaid plans? The background is that I would like to give my kid a way to play around without worrying about the bill, even if that could mean being blocked for the remaining part of a month after allocated resources are exhausted. We are using Neocities at the moment, which is great (thanks @kyledrake) but we are outgrowing it, especially since at some point you need a real backend. When I learned web, I self hosted and could use university resources but today I find it hard to find a risk free environment for experimentation.
- jve 2y ago
  Hosting what? VM? Managed hardware? Hard pricing definitely an option as traffic is not metered and one can pay in advance for x months and after that terminate the service.
  - weinzierl 2y ago
    A VM would do it, but what service has unmetered traffic? Don't they all have fine print where they reserve the right to charge you if you overextend your allowance? To be clear: I want to pay for our traffic and don't want to free ride, but I want the failure mode to be "we cut you off" and not "we'll send you the bill later (possibly much later)".
    - jve 2y ago
      We really do have free traffic. ToS ofcourse applies and we will warn and cut off but not bill - we don't have a mechanism to bill for traffic anyways.
fourfour3 2y ago
I've been doing colocation in the UK for my personal hosting for 15+ years now, and it has worked fantastically well for me. There are three things I'd recommend though that the articles kind of gloss over: * get reasonable OOB access as a priority * get real server hardware * set up backup on day 1 OOB access can be as simple as a serial console server that your colo provider lets you access (most modern servers still have DE9 serial ports!), but ideally you want server hardware with an IPMI. It is fantastic for saving you from the 'oh no, I just firewalled myself out' problem (my colo provider is about an hour away, I don't want to do that trek on my weekends!), and with a proper IPMI you can boot from an ISO file over USB to do things like OS upgrades/reinstalls/recovery or firmware updates with ease. I personally have a Mikrotik router doing WireGuard for me to connect to for remote access to secure the IPMI behind a VPN. Real server hardware saves you a ton of time & money in the long run for less upfront cost than you think. There's a lot of options - HP/Dell for more traditional choices (incl on site servicing options), Supermicro are well established, and there are more recent challengers that are putting out reasonable hardware like ASRock Rack. You should expect to buy this in a B2B fashion - you'll probably talk to/email a salesperson, but I've found I get ridiculously better pricing this way than buying online. As a bonus, you get an IPMI, ECC RAM that works, hot-swap drive trays, etc. In my experience, this kind of hardware really rarely fails - it's designed for 24x7 usage. There's lots of backup options. You might push to something like Backblaze b2, use someone like BorgBase, or push backups to home. I have a home server with a bunch of hard disks, so I do a mix - I use borgbackup & push my backups daily to both my home server and to BorgBase. My personal colo right now is an ASRock Rack EPYC 4004 barebone with a 12 core 24 thread CPU, 128G of RAM, 2x 2TB NVMe SSD, 2x 4TB SATA SSD, another 2x 2TB SATA SSD. I use quite a bit of the storage, and I use it to self-host a bunch of useful things - eg GitLab, CI, email, containers via Docker, side projects, the odd game server for playing things with friends. Adding up what those would cost me to host individually via VMs, AWS, GitHub subscriptions, etc makes paying for colocation an option I'm very happy with!
- schmookeeg 2y ago
  I've said this to any of my engy friends who will listen. (not many) There's a small, yet tangible benefit to having a blank hardware slate to just riff on an idea when it strikes you, and having ample compute/storage/bandwidth to play with the idea. Or to send yourself down a spaghetti sysadmin nightmare you get to untangle. :) It's been a consistent part of my career since 2007 and I'd hate to not have it. Homelab is great, but spinning up your own VMs, architectures, all of it... is a superset of that same satisfaction.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
anymouse123456 2y ago
In similar news, inexpensive internet connections and old workstations are much faster, and more reliable than entry level cloud crap that's constantly shifting like sand underneath you. A $400-$600 workstation PC and a 400/40 connection with static IPs worked great for our first couple years of development.

176 points by ingve 2y ago

Article title: More jabbering from me about non-clown hosting Related post A terrible way to jump into colocating your own stuff (184 points, 1 day ago, 126 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41622653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41622653

blackfur 2y ago

My last experience with colocation hosting was that just the monthly fee was way more than a dedicated server on the same host. It was so confusing and I really want to hear some feedback if anyone else has had a similar experience.

Aeolun 2y ago
I sort of had the same experience in that it rapidly got cheaper the more of a rack I wanted, but a single server was just pointless.
navaati 2y ago
Yes, that's my biggest "let down" with this writing: at least in my corner of the world (Paris), colo starts at 300€/month for something reasonable, or at the very least 100€ for low power 1U (so you can host... a switch). That's as much as a rent ! On the other hand you can get a nice enough dedicated server for 15€/month. So yeah, if I'm missing something please tell me because I'd love to but I can't justify the price for hobby stuff.
- cm2187 2y ago
  It depends what you do with it. If you only need a small VM to manage your emails nothing will beat a VPS. But I also use it for offsite backup, so need a bit of storage. When you add dozens of TB, dedicated quickly becomes way more expensive. Particularly given that I tend to park there old hard drives which cost I have already amortised.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    Well, up to a few dozens of TB hetzner will charge you €27 per month for each 22TB hard drive, so it's not that fast that colocation gets better.
    - cm2187 2y ago
      If you buy your drives smartly that's amortised after 8 months. When you are looking at the cost over 5 years, it is hard to beat colocation for specialised hardware.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        I'm ignoring upfront cost here, and going based on the premise of 100€-300€ as the monthly fee for colocation. You can't amortize your way out of that.
- vidarh 2y ago
  You're not really missing anything. Co-location has never scaled down to 1U very well, because of the overheads - you can't just let trust 40+ customers to slide their 1U server into the same rack without security concerns and/or losing lots of space, and having extra work with power distribution and networking that the customers themselves are responsible for with a full rack. Just access arrangement for 40x more customers adds up in admin overheads, and colocation isn't really a tech play as much as it's a real-estate play similar to parking where the goal is minimum effort rent-extraction with as little staff as possible...
  - jve 2y ago
    We have colo starting from 1U/35€: https://delska.com/services/colocation-rack-rental/ https://delska.com/services/colocation-rack-rental/ - but that is for some non-power hungry <100W device. Then you buy increments of 100W power. Regarding security aspect, as for what customer can do: you can bring your device and put it in shared rack while support personnel accompanies you. Power/Ethernet and if keyboard/screen is needed will be managed/connected/wired only by support staff. One can rent a whole rack if you want dedicated access. And 1/2 or 1/4 racks are available if fullsize is not needed.
    - vidarh 2y ago
      That is making exactly the point I was making: That the price for 1U will tend to not be very competitive with renting dedicated servers (I can rent a server including hosting for that price) because the overheads to the provider of subdividing that 42U rack adds up. The point wasn't that the security can't be dealt with, but that dealing with it is one more thing that contributes to a higher cost per U if you rent 1U than if you rent quarter rack or more.
  - AmericanChopper 2y ago
    A 1U can very easily contain 64+ physical cores, many TB of storage, and a few hundred GB of RAM. A 1U colo can be a great deal if you’re looking to use that much compute/storage. The admin for those arrangements is pretty simple really. Even if you’re providing supervised access, it’s not going to be much work. I run several small colo deployments like this, and I probably only visit the sites every couple of years.
- consteval 2y ago
  You're better off self-hosting if your needs are small enough you only require a single machine.
em500 2y ago
Sounds like simple economy of scale? Same reason why for many things buying brand new can be cheaper than trying to get defects repaired. (I'd assume coloc is more labor intensive for the host.)
bubblethink 2y ago
Colo is for racks. It's for businesses. If you just need a single server, you'll be better served by a dedicated server from hetzner, ovh, etc. The only exception I can think of to this is GPUs. If you have your own GPUs and have a legitimate use for them, colo pricing may beat server rentals.
- coverband 2y ago
  Absolutely my experience as well... Plus your vendor options are reduced since the location has to be somewhere within driving distance for you, or your "caretaker" so that you can replace that flatlined drive with a new one without significant downtime.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > Colo is for racks. It's for businesses. This blog post mentions parking an old switch with a derpy little raspberry pi. Also, what makes colocation something for businesses is cost. The likes of Hetzner also sells colocation, and nowadays you can buy a used rack for around $100. Moreover, today's COTS computers are not like your parent's. A mini PC selling nowadays for peanuts has gigabit Ethernet, 16GB of RAM and half a dozen or so cores. You'd pay a small fortune for servers with those characteristics in the early 2000s, and nowadays that hardware is used to check emails.
  - navaati 2y ago
    > Hetzner also sells colocation Oooooh, they do ! 120€ for 14U, now we're talking ! It's in Germany of course... I think that indeed my problem here is that I live in too expensive a place, expensive for me, expensive for my servers ><.
    - danielh 2y ago
      Please be aware that this doesn't include electricity and cooling, which is really expensive in Germany. They charge 0.476€/kWh. Running a single 4090 @ 450W 24/7 would add another ~150€/month.
  - 2y ago
TZubiri 2y ago
You pay for the privilege of choosing and owning your hardware. Turns out it's cheaper to let the colo facility buy all of the same hardware and have full control to it. Who would have thunk
toast0 2y ago
Where I am in the market, the managed dedicated server is 10+ years old, so there's no capital cost there. More upscale, the host may have volume discounts with the OEM that you won't get, unless you've got other business (maybe you buy a lot of laptops for your staff, so you can get servers for less as well) It's got to be cheaper to have me as a customer when I never show up in person, and don't even know precisely where the server is. For a colo, they need to provide me with access, and supervise me when I visit, and put up locking cabinets (and make sure they aren't all keyed alike!), they'd also need to be able to meter power, etc. There's definitely reasons to colo instead as a customer, but usually it's lots of hardware, or specialized hardware, or sometimes if you have networking needs that the host won't accomidate in dedicated; maybe you want to run an ASN and have direct connections to other peers / transit / IX.
rwmj 2y ago
Location seems to matter. Back when I was using colocation in Docklands (London area where all the main hosting happens) it was very expensive. ISTR 2U was hundreds per month. I'm guessing Rachel is not paying that for her Raspberry Pi, but maybe not hosting in such a central area.
bakugo 2y ago
>just the monthly fee was way more than a dedicated server on the same host What kind of "dedicated server"? When you colocate, you have full control over the choice of hardware, meaning you can stuff 200TB worth of hard drives and 512GB of RAM into a machine and pay a few hundred dollars max for it. Good luck finding someone willing to rent out a dedicated server with those specs for the same price as the colocation.
justinclift 2y ago
I guess it kind of depends? As a data point, for two 1U servers co-located in Australia I'm paying about AU$500 per month. If these two servers were low spec, then that would be more expensive than just renting dedicated servers. But I can put whatever spec servers fit in those two rack units, including things with quite a lot of ram, quite a few ssds, 10GbE+ network links, etc. Doing the same thing as that with dedicated servers would be quite a bit more than the AU$500/mo I'm currently spending. --- As a data point for anyone interested, those two servers are running Proxmox and host a bunch of (Linux) VMs that provide online services. Live migration (etc) between them works fine, etc. :)
- AmericanChopper 2y ago
  If you need something close to the full compute a 1U can offer, then you can definitely get value for money from ordinary colo like that. But you’ll get a lot more value if you need a full or half rack. But if you just need a single VPS it’s not going to add up.
- abigail95 2y ago
  How much power do you get for that?
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Good question. :) We're using this crowd, and they've been really good: https://www.ransomit.com.au/colocation/ https://www.ransomit.com.au/colocation/ Would recommend. :) I'm not sure how much power is included. They asked for the specs for the servers, which we provided, and they gave us the above quote which we took them up on. That price also includes some extra stuff. An IPv4 /28, and dedicated VPN for the IPMI/iDRAC ports on the two servers. Each 1U server seems to idle at just over 100W, though when they get busy they ramp up to several times that.
9cb14c1ec0 2y ago
> My last experience with colocation hosting was that just the monthly fee was way more than a dedicated server on the same host. Cheap dedicated servers are usually very old and buggy hardware. With colocation, you can actually install some very good server hardware (pick up some good refurbished stuff rather than buying new)

lifeisstillgood 2y ago

I am fairly sure remote working and hybrid working are here to stay. Which means the commercial real estate market is going to shift with more and more “co-working” spaces being created. One thing I wonder is if they will simply turn one office room into a co-low space - where it’s easier to drive to, it’s simpler to manage. Because cloud first is a rubbish solution for most people - just have a server with a TB of disk and most companies can live on that happily running away in the corner. And there might be a growth for companies that have expertise in the basics of racks and HVACs just to run that room for them.

bpye 2y ago
I’m sure I’ve heard of this somewhere - where someone is hosting out of a coworking space’s server room - but of course cannot recall where. It’s not surprising I guess, office buildings often(?) have one or multiple server rooms, backup power or generators, maybe even redundant networking.
llm_trw 2y ago
I'm in the process of finding where to put $100,000 of 4090s for training non-llm models. It looks like "my garage" is cheaper by far even when I include installing an HVAC system and 3 phase power when I look at yearly costs for a spot with 20kW's of power.
- isoprophlex 2y ago
  Did you factor in security to avoid the local thug population shopping for some free gpu compute?
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    A gun and some discretion are pretty cheap
    - komali2 2y ago
      You'll sit in the garage with a gun 24/7?

p0w3n3d 2y ago

Thank you very much for the education, the grassroots works. To be honest there is a lot of things nowadays which are covering up easier, cheaper and sometimes better ways which used to be normal. Younger people for example no longer know they can buy their own music or movies. And sometimes they send things from one computer to another using a Dropbox

moomin 2y ago

If CoLo meant I had Rachel Kroll as my sysadmin, I’d regard it as a pretty good deal too. Unfortunately, it means I’d have me.

krab 2y ago
That's a pretty much orthogonal issue if you compare dedicated servers to, say AWS EC2. There aren't that many tasks you would have to perform on bare metal that you don't have to do in EC2. PaaS such as Heroku or Vercel, that's another story.
ur-whale 2y ago
> Unfortunately, it means I’d have me. Yeah gearheads have a saying for that: first upgrade the driver then upgrade the car.

dannyobrien 2y ago

Related and kinda related links: * In San Francisco, good old MonkeyBrains offers an off-the-menu, In'n'Out-style coloc deal: https://www.monkeybrains.net/colocation.php https://www.monkeybrains.net/colocation.php Fun! If you're thinking of doing this, say so here, maybe we can all share an amp or two. * If you just want to play with something that isn't an Amazon instance, and are not sure you want to commit to a >$50 a month server somewhere, https://lowendbox.com/ https://lowendbox.com/ always has a few crazy deals. * Never underestimate just slinging a box under your desk at the end of a consumer internet connection. I think people sometimes overestimate how difficult it is; I honestly think everyone should do it once, if only to get that visceral feel of being a peer on the global Internet.

genewitch 2y ago
> at the end of a consumer internet connection. CGNAT needs to be routed around, which means you need at least a "$5 VPS" with a routable IP address to bastion for you. If you monitor the word "wifi" on social media it's a pretty decent proxy for where CGNAT is prevalent. Used in a sentence, "we just got wifi at the new house." I've written a couple guides on this and subjects like it; i've had to use squid in a datacenter to forward proxy my lightning detector at the house, otherwise it would never receive a heartbeat - even though it would auth and start trying to send data; i've bypassed CGNAT so i could host console "co-op" games (diablo III, for example); and i've "mirrored" my phone media sync to a colocated server as well, just to avoid trying to route around (triple?) CGNAT to my synology at home.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Tailscale funnel will let you expose a service to the world without a $5 VPS.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    ipv4 space and bandwidth cost non-zero dollars so I'd ask "who is paying and why?" I'm understand that a significant portion of HN is on fiber or whatever, but not everyone has access to fiber, cable, or even - dare i speak it - DSL. CGNAT was mentioned as being prevalent in the UK and germany almost 6 years ago (for example.) I haven't had a non-cgnat ISP the entire time i've lived in Louisiana, and not for lack of trying. (at&t, t-mobile, at&t fixed wireless (x2!), starlink) I'm not paying >$5/month to solve the problem "but what if i want to self host a public service" to switch to business or whatever, either, that's ridiculous. edit: also i have colo hardware; i write guides for people who either don't or don't know how. cool if tailscale works. wireguard does too...

renewiltord 2y ago

I’m always interested in a cheap Colo somewhere. Anywhere in continental US is fine. I’ll ship my stuff in, fly there, and set it up and try to make it work without repeat trips. Anyone have any ideas? One of the more crazy ones was that I just buy a home in Utah that’s rural ish to be cheap enough but also near fiber. Hard but there are some options.

toast0 2y ago
Webhostingtalk, lowendbox, and lowendtalk should have some options for you. Anywhere with a major internet exchange is likely to have lots of options. If you don't know where those are, you can just look for cities with Equinix locations. Equinix isn't cheap, but some will have a warehouse on the cheap side of town with fiber to Equinix and you can rent a cabinet from them.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Oh surprising. I thought that those sites were for VPS alone. Thank you.
  - toast0 2y ago
    They have everything. Shared hosting, tiny VPS, full sized VPS, managed/dedicated, colo, IP rental, etc.
dilyevsky 2y ago
Hurricane Electric has a deal - $600 a cabinet with power and 1gbps transit. Used to be $300…
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Haha it’s funny I posted about that earlier in the day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630783 They even had a $400/halfcab option earlier this year. Pity I didn’t jump on it.
2y ago

chris_engel 2y ago

Colocation, I don't know... Without questioning peoples preferences but I think at that point I'd rather look for a decent fiber network connection for my home and let that raspberry run in my own cupboard. I mean, its a RASPBERRY you would probably do fine even without the fiber connection.

sschueller 2y ago
It depends what it is. I have 25/25 fiber at home for practically nothing (~70 USD a month) but I can only go so far even with a UPS. If I loose power for too long or my internet goes down I have no backup which I would have at a co-location facility.
- jbverschoor 2y ago
  A 2200VA/1320W UPS will run a macmini on full load (50watts) for 2 hours. So it's safe to say 12-20 hours under normal load.
- altairprime 2y ago
  If those circumstances occur, what would you be serving that can't afford to go offline for a couple days? It's important to have an answer to that question, rather than to assume that being offline when your home internet is down is inherently a problem. You can safely estimate using "X nines will cost X digits per month": 1 nines, 36.5 days/year downtime is $#/month. (openwifi tier) 2 nines, 3.65 days/year downtime is $##/month. (residential tier) 3 nines, 9 hours/year downtime; are $###/month. (commercial tier, datacenter tier) 4 nines, 1 hour/year downtime, is $####/month. (datacenter tier) 5 nines, 5 minutes/year downtime, is $#####/month. (carrier tier) Speaking from experience, it's both important to decide which 'nines' you require before you invest in making things more resilient — and it's important to be able to say things to yourself like, for example, "I don't care if it's down 4 days per year, so I won't spend more than $##/month on hosting it".
- forty 2y ago
  It's always a surprise to me how expensive internet access can be in the US. Here in France 1Gb/700Mb fiber connection costs 30€/month (and this is without commitment and includes TV stuff - "more than 180 channels" whatever that means, and landline phone)

robertclaus 2y ago

I've pretty much always had a raspberry pi running a few services in my basement. I never really considered moving it to some else's property. Interesting to hear it's an option.

krab 2y ago

... and we were doing serverless and build less before it was cool! It was called "shared PHP hosting". :-D

immibis 2y ago
It was pointed out recently on HN that Lambda is basically CGI-as-a-service. (CGI being a more language-agnostic spec that operates similarly to PHP)
- hooverd 2y ago
  The real value-add from Lambda is integration with the rest of the AWS ecosystem. It doesn't even scale up without breaking the bank. But it does scale down to zero. And can process events from EventBridge, DDB, S3, SQS, SNS, and every AWS service under the sun. It's really good at that. If you want to run an API, slap a Go executable on an EC2 or ECS instance.
- sirsinsalot 2y ago
  Lemme just login to cPanel and check that

DeathArrow 2y ago

I don't know what to say. Not paying big bucks to cloud platforms so they can lock you in and keep your code and data hostage seems undemocratic.

Stem0037 2y ago

While colocation offers greater control and potentially lower costs for high-performance needs, it's worth noting that for many small to medium-sized operations, cloud services can still be more cost-effective when factoring in the total cost of ownership (TCO). This includes not just hardware costs, but also the time and expertise required for maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting. Another one of the primary advantages of cloud services is the ease of scaling. In a colocation environment, scaling up often means purchasing new hardware and physically installing it. How do you address the scalability needs of rapidly growing applications or services in a colocation setup?

altairprime 2y ago
While that may be true, it's not relevant in the context of the article. As the final paragraphs indicate, this is about telling people that datacenters exist at all (yes, people don't realize this!) and allow anyone to sign up and host stuff: > If this is old hat to you, great! It means you're probably a grizzled 1990s sysadmin just like me, consarn it! This isn't for you, then. > This is for the newer folks who might not have realized that there's an alternative to paying tribute to one of the three churches of the Clown: M, G, or A. If you want to "get your stuff online", there are other ways... and there always have been! If you don't realize that self-service and managed-tier datacenters exist, you can't properly investigate, calculate, and compare TCO — and certainly the cloud providers aren't going to bring up datacenters unless they have to.
phamilton 2y ago
I'd add that cloud services are dramatically cheaper when your application is able to tolerate preemption. Spot pricing in AWS is around $0.015/vcpu/hr. That still going to be more expensive than a dedicated server, but it's much closer. If you have cyclical traffic patterns and other elastic workloads, the gap can be almost non-existent, even without considering personnel.
sethammons 2y ago
SendGrid ran our own data centers and scaled massively. Yes, orders to dell took forever and we were often worried if we were going to have enough compute. It worked out to be vastly cheaper than aws but we still moved load into their cloud to help new projects spin up and burst activity. And moving over to managed services eventually became our default, not because it was monetarily cheaper, but because it let teams develop faster.

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago

What a coincidence, I spun up my first VM on DigitalOcean just yesterday for $4 a month. It felt... freeing after a few years of working with the Big Three for various things, big and small. Still a step above schlepping your own hardware, but it was still the cheapest Debian VM I could find by about a factor of 2. (Admittedly, I didn't look too hard, let me know if you know a better one.) https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/common-sense-security-for-ssh-on-a-new-debian-server/ https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/common-sense-...

fragmede 2y ago
might I suggest changing the port ssh runs on from 22 to something else in your guide? and imo fail2ban -1 is just a recpie for getting locked out. personally I found the $4 DO droplet underpowered.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  I've been considering changing the SSH port, just for that extra bit of security. As for fail2ban -1, I just like seeing the Banned IP list slowly engulf the screen over time ;)
  - fragmede 2y ago
    changing the ssh port is also for noise reasons. The number of drive bys on port 22 is insane.
fellerts 2y ago
I'd suggest adding ssh-audit to your list. It's literally a tool to harden SSH configs. https://www.ssh-audit.com/ https://www.ssh-audit.com/
- stavros 2y ago
  This looks good, but unfortunately it doesn't give you the config to fix your setup, it just complains about your curves.

throwaway984393 2y ago

I'm a little less grizzled, but I'm so glad I never have to deal with shuffling around broken hardware anymore, much less diagnosing the most inane, obscure bugs due to the hardware slowly crapping out. I've lost so much sleep to shit hardware and unstable, untrustworthy colos. APIs and automation rather than cage monkeys, IPMI, expect and crossed fingers. The Cloud is my church and I've seen the light, hallelujah.

lbriner 2y ago

We are seriously considering moving downwards from a dedicated server to some kind of BYOD/co-location. 1) Our server is at least 5 years old but you are still paying a high monthly charge. We have probably paid back 5 times its cost already (I know this includes power/air-con etc) 2) Even a recent quote for another 256GB RAM was quoted at $1200 install and $300 PER MONTH! 3) We find that the support are not quite good enough for anything other than the basics. We had a network performance issue that we insisted was something in their infra and they denied it, it was only after I used Wireshark to prove the problem that they finally found it. YMMV of course. 4) We run some test Hypervisors and then only support Windows + Hyper-V (or VMWare on their "cloud"). I don't mind Windows except the monthly Windows updates are very slow and tedious and require VMs to be shutdown. 5) We are getting performance issues because ultimately, each Hypervisor has one disk (might be RAID1) and 10 VMs all writing to it, this seems to have affected throughput, particularly on build agents which write a lot of stuff to disk. On the plus side: 1) We get 24 hour support for major outages, whether caused by them or us. They obviously can't fix anything we have broken but we at least have someone to call if the network seems to have gone down, for example. 2) We can have additional equipment run up reasonably quickly without having to purchase it or go to site. If we move to co-location, we can probably get an amazing server with 4 disks and 1024GB RAM for less than $10K, run Xen or Proxmox on it and get much better performance, although whether they would charge much less is the question. I don't know how many co-loc providers want people with only 1 or 2 servers, I guess they prefer the big corps who want to move 10 racks worth of stuff there.

Neil44 2y ago

People seem to be scared of owning servers. But my experience has been that generally speaking they're very reliable. If it's important you would always want duplicates, fallbacks etc but it's only the same with cloud services - multi region, multi cloud.

Nextgrid 2y ago
People spread FUD about running servers because they're scared their careers of complexity and fat margins on cloud services will evaporate.

c0balt 2y ago

Interesting, their definition of managed hosting appears to be quite different from my experience at a provider for managed hosting. We explicitly didn't grant customers "root" access unless they requested it. This both made it easier for us (less cleanup when a customer mucks up the setup) and for some customers)(no easy way to mess up your installation). Most people just wanted a managed deployment of their PHP app, a webshop or WordPress and this worked well.

kqr 2y ago
I agree. Managed hosting to me means configuring software and supplying only credentials for limited admin panels, not full server access.

Havoc 2y ago

Let’s be real - if it could run in a raspberry temporarily then a five dollar vps would have been overkill let alone colo

asymmetric 2y ago

Is there a list of colos by country/region somewhere?

kkfx 2y ago

Never underestimate the co-location power of personal homes of employees with their own HVAC, p.v. with storage and FTTH bandwidth: with good compensation to them might be cheaper and better supervised than choosing a third party. Ladies and Gentleman's it's about time to show the real purpose of homelabs and get paid for the ownership instead of paying third parties, it's about time to use modern logistic to work in a decentralized world instead of insisting with the old mainframe model renamed cloud. Imaging this world and how any remote worker in his/her own home could be a single-person company in a thriving society, instead of a flat+vertex one where most own nothing and smile like Canon workers in China https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/17/22538160/ai-camera-smile-recognition-office-workers-china-canon https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/17/22538160/ai-camera-smile-...

arkh 2y ago
You're making me think: communal Kubernetes cluster. You setup your nodes at home and share them with some people to make a cluster. The main problem would be securing secrets and data or you'd have to limit yourself to things you don't mind being public.
- kkfx 2y ago
  No need to imitate giants, meaning there is no reason to use k*s. We have declarative systems like NixOS and Guix System, there is no need to use paravirtualization, who is born for commercial reasons: selling ready made stuff to those who do not know at a price you can't sell for a snippet of nix/scheme. A company can simply develop their own decentralized infra, hosted by their employees. If it will need more it will also have money to buy sheds with p.v. and storage with good enough fiber links to have their own small datacenters.
  - arkh 2y ago
    I was thinking more of a cooperative operation. So people could totally join and quit on a whim and I think k8s would help with automatically moving your app were there is available resources.

sangnoir 2y ago

Why are colocation providers reluctant to have clear pricing on their websites? Most of them have some form of "Contact us for a quote" link. I get their target market is B2B, but the additional friction probably prevents many colo-curious homelab operators from making the jump.

9cb14c1ec0 2y ago
Anyone that doesn't have clear pricing doesn't want the colo-curious homelab crowd. Many colo companies won't do less than a full rack.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  The weird thing is some do publish the price of 1U/1 Amp along with half-racks and full racks, and nothing in between - not even a formula to estimate costs if one doesn't nearly fall into one of those buckets. The 1U pricing suggests that some do care about 1U collocation, while simultaneously limiting price information to quote requests for a 2U or an 800W 1U. It's strange.

weinzierl 2y ago

While we are at non-clown hosting and others suggesting smaller, alternative hosting options: Is there a hoster that offers hard pricing caps or maybe prepaid plans? The background is that I would like to give my kid a way to play around without worrying about the bill, even if that could mean being blocked for the remaining part of a month after allocated resources are exhausted. We are using Neocities at the moment, which is great (thanks @kyledrake) but we are outgrowing it, especially since at some point you need a real backend. When I learned web, I self hosted and could use university resources but today I find it hard to find a risk free environment for experimentation.

jve 2y ago
Hosting what? VM? Managed hardware? Hard pricing definitely an option as traffic is not metered and one can pay in advance for x months and after that terminate the service.
- weinzierl 2y ago
  A VM would do it, but what service has unmetered traffic? Don't they all have fine print where they reserve the right to charge you if you overextend your allowance? To be clear: I want to pay for our traffic and don't want to free ride, but I want the failure mode to be "we cut you off" and not "we'll send you the bill later (possibly much later)".
  - jve 2y ago
    We really do have free traffic. ToS ofcourse applies and we will warn and cut off but not bill - we don't have a mechanism to bill for traffic anyways.

fourfour3 2y ago

I've been doing colocation in the UK for my personal hosting for 15+ years now, and it has worked fantastically well for me. There are three things I'd recommend though that the articles kind of gloss over: * get reasonable OOB access as a priority * get real server hardware * set up backup on day 1 OOB access can be as simple as a serial console server that your colo provider lets you access (most modern servers still have DE9 serial ports!), but ideally you want server hardware with an IPMI. It is fantastic for saving you from the 'oh no, I just firewalled myself out' problem (my colo provider is about an hour away, I don't want to do that trek on my weekends!), and with a proper IPMI you can boot from an ISO file over USB to do things like OS upgrades/reinstalls/recovery or firmware updates with ease. I personally have a Mikrotik router doing WireGuard for me to connect to for remote access to secure the IPMI behind a VPN. Real server hardware saves you a ton of time & money in the long run for less upfront cost than you think. There's a lot of options - HP/Dell for more traditional choices (incl on site servicing options), Supermicro are well established, and there are more recent challengers that are putting out reasonable hardware like ASRock Rack. You should expect to buy this in a B2B fashion - you'll probably talk to/email a salesperson, but I've found I get ridiculously better pricing this way than buying online. As a bonus, you get an IPMI, ECC RAM that works, hot-swap drive trays, etc. In my experience, this kind of hardware really rarely fails - it's designed for 24x7 usage. There's lots of backup options. You might push to something like Backblaze b2, use someone like BorgBase, or push backups to home. I have a home server with a bunch of hard disks, so I do a mix - I use borgbackup & push my backups daily to both my home server and to BorgBase. My personal colo right now is an ASRock Rack EPYC 4004 barebone with a 12 core 24 thread CPU, 128G of RAM, 2x 2TB NVMe SSD, 2x 4TB SATA SSD, another 2x 2TB SATA SSD. I use quite a bit of the storage, and I use it to self-host a bunch of useful things - eg GitLab, CI, email, containers via Docker, side projects, the odd game server for playing things with friends. Adding up what those would cost me to host individually via VMs, AWS, GitHub subscriptions, etc makes paying for colocation an option I'm very happy with!

schmookeeg 2y ago
I've said this to any of my engy friends who will listen. (not many) There's a small, yet tangible benefit to having a blank hardware slate to just riff on an idea when it strikes you, and having ample compute/storage/bandwidth to play with the idea. Or to send yourself down a spaghetti sysadmin nightmare you get to untangle. :) It's been a consistent part of my career since 2007 and I'd hate to not have it. Homelab is great, but spinning up your own VMs, architectures, all of it... is a superset of that same satisfaction.

deleted 2y ago

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anymouse123456 2y ago

In similar news, inexpensive internet connections and old workstations are much faster, and more reliable than entry level cloud crap that's constantly shifting like sand underneath you. A $400-$600 workstation PC and a 400/40 connection with static IPs worked great for our first couple years of development.