3 ms·

It seems like most of those issues could be solved with a distributed orchestration layer, the same kind used to power SETI@home, BOINC, crypto mining, RC5 decr

It seems like most of those issues could be solved with a distributed orchestration layer, the same kind used to power SETI@home, BOINC, crypto mining, RC5 decryption back in the day, etc. E.g. if the administration of billing, compute, and storage were decentralized and each home node could drop in and drop out as necessary. AWS itself has nodes that can be preempted by higher paying users, no, with barely a few seconds to shut down your workflows? You shouldn't misrepresent your home lab as an actual hosting business with staff and a data center and insurance and all that, but there still ought to be a way to loan out idle resources on an ephemeral basis.

paxys 2y ago
The economics simply don't work. Add up hardware, ongoing maintenance, electricity and ISP costs, and then the cut that the middleman will take (realistically 30-50%, probably more), and there's no reality where you can compete with a $4/month VPS from Hetzner.
- solardev 2y ago
  Not on reliability, sure, but compute?
- lostmsu 2y ago
  VPS maybe not, but GPU servers are very viable (we built one).
- nucleardog 2y ago
  We're not talking starting up a hosting company but renting idle capacity. I'm already paying for the hardware, maintenance, electricity, and connectivity. The only real marginal cost to renting some of my idle capacity would be additional power use. Versus current draw, the power supply running maxed out 24/7 would increase my power bill by $36/mo. If we use the $4.59/mo VPS as a point of comparison, just one of the servers heating up my utility room has 24x the CPU cores ($110/mo), 96x the RAM ($440/mo) and 1024x the storage ($4,700/mo). I would never in a million years actually do so, but I'm relatively certain I could turn several dozen CPU cores, hundreds of GB of RAM, and terabytes of disk space into more than $72/mo (assuming only getting 50% of the revenue) _somehow_.
actuallyalys 2y ago
Sure, but AWS has human customer support and engineers overseeing all that (not to mention accountants and lawyers).

paxys 2y ago

The economics simply don't work. Add up hardware, ongoing maintenance, electricity and ISP costs, and then the cut that the middleman will take (realistically 30-50%, probably more), and there's no reality where you can compete with a $4/month VPS from Hetzner.

solardev 2y ago
Not on reliability, sure, but compute?
lostmsu 2y ago
VPS maybe not, but GPU servers are very viable (we built one).
nucleardog 2y ago
We're not talking starting up a hosting company but renting idle capacity. I'm already paying for the hardware, maintenance, electricity, and connectivity. The only real marginal cost to renting some of my idle capacity would be additional power use. Versus current draw, the power supply running maxed out 24/7 would increase my power bill by $36/mo. If we use the $4.59/mo VPS as a point of comparison, just one of the servers heating up my utility room has 24x the CPU cores ($110/mo), 96x the RAM ($440/mo) and 1024x the storage ($4,700/mo). I would never in a million years actually do so, but I'm relatively certain I could turn several dozen CPU cores, hundreds of GB of RAM, and terabytes of disk space into more than $72/mo (assuming only getting 50% of the revenue) _somehow_.

actuallyalys 2y ago

Sure, but AWS has human customer support and engineers overseeing all that (not to mention accountants and lawyers).