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This is pretty bad still, with colocation you can get the costs down to 1/100th with good deals at datacenters especially ones that are struggling to attract cu

This is pretty bad still, with colocation you can get the costs down to 1/100th with good deals at datacenters especially ones that are struggling to attract customers. Most of your bill is power so if you rack efficiency optimized servers you can have a lot of compute for very cheap. In terms of networking many offer no-headache solutions with some kind of transit blend. <rant>I recently had to switch away from hetzner due to random dhclient failures causing connectivity loss once ip's expired, complete failure of the loadbalancer - stopped forwarding traffic for around 6 hours and the worst part is that there was no acknoledgement from hetzner about any of these issues so at some point I was going insane over trying to find what is the issue when in the end it was hetzner. (US VA region)

tom1337 1y ago
But when you are Colocating you have higher upfront costs as you need to acquire hardware and also need to have somebody nearby the datacenter for hardware swaps in case of a failure, no?
- hyperionplays 1y ago
  There's tonnes of companies out there who have smart remote hands in the major cities who can respond in sub 1hour to an outage at your choosen DC. Refurb servers will still blast AWS, and spares are easy to source. I know HE.net does a rack for like $500/mo intro price and that comes with a 1G internet feed as well.
- dboreham 1y ago
  You need to buy the hardware. However, you don't really need a dude on-hand to swap stuff on a daily basis, unless you're trying to host backblaze. The approach we take (with our data center 1000 miles away) is to provision excess machines. So if we need 6 machines we'll provision, say 8. Failure modes are always assumed to be "the whole machine" -- so a machine is either in service or not. Over time (years) one or two machines might fail in one way or another. Every couple of years we mount a rescue mission to repair/replace the bad machines, do some upgrades etc. We have redundant switches and routers and would make a special trip to replace one of those if there were a failure. The entire deployment has a "scaled to zero" cloud hot standby in place for the eventuality that the whole setup gets nuked somehow.
- scjon 1y ago
  There's higher upfront costs, but typically we find that we are breakeven for the cost of hardware in 12 months or less. In my experience, colos will have techs available for hardware swaps / remote hands troubleshooting if needed. It's not free for that but it solves that problem. I think it really just depends on your company's needs and skillset. For our company it makes sense to colocate. We are a VOIP service provider, so we also have multiple IP transit providers and our own /22 subnet. We use BGP to change / pull routes quickly when there's outages with an ISP or cloud provider. I know AWS supports a setup like that, but you're relying on them for announcing route changes.
- kachapopopow 1y ago
  using decomissioned hardware saves you 90% of the costs and you usually colocate where you live or just have one of your tech friends help out :) most datacenters do offer remote hands which is a bit pricey, but since they're only needed in emergencies in a redundant setup it is just not required.
9cb14c1ec0 1y ago
Cogent just offered me this colo deal: Full Rack = $100/month* with $500 install, Power (20A) = $350/month with $500 install, DIA (1Gbps) = $300/month Total = $750/month plus $1,000 Install on 12 month term
- karterk 1y ago
  Where is this, if I may ask?
  - kachapopopow 1y ago
    i don't recommend cogent.

tom1337 1y ago

But when you are Colocating you have higher upfront costs as you need to acquire hardware and also need to have somebody nearby the datacenter for hardware swaps in case of a failure, no?

hyperionplays 1y ago
There's tonnes of companies out there who have smart remote hands in the major cities who can respond in sub 1hour to an outage at your choosen DC. Refurb servers will still blast AWS, and spares are easy to source. I know HE.net does a rack for like $500/mo intro price and that comes with a 1G internet feed as well.
dboreham 1y ago
You need to buy the hardware. However, you don't really need a dude on-hand to swap stuff on a daily basis, unless you're trying to host backblaze. The approach we take (with our data center 1000 miles away) is to provision excess machines. So if we need 6 machines we'll provision, say 8. Failure modes are always assumed to be "the whole machine" -- so a machine is either in service or not. Over time (years) one or two machines might fail in one way or another. Every couple of years we mount a rescue mission to repair/replace the bad machines, do some upgrades etc. We have redundant switches and routers and would make a special trip to replace one of those if there were a failure. The entire deployment has a "scaled to zero" cloud hot standby in place for the eventuality that the whole setup gets nuked somehow.
scjon 1y ago
There's higher upfront costs, but typically we find that we are breakeven for the cost of hardware in 12 months or less. In my experience, colos will have techs available for hardware swaps / remote hands troubleshooting if needed. It's not free for that but it solves that problem. I think it really just depends on your company's needs and skillset. For our company it makes sense to colocate. We are a VOIP service provider, so we also have multiple IP transit providers and our own /22 subnet. We use BGP to change / pull routes quickly when there's outages with an ISP or cloud provider. I know AWS supports a setup like that, but you're relying on them for announcing route changes.
kachapopopow 1y ago
using decomissioned hardware saves you 90% of the costs and you usually colocate where you live or just have one of your tech friends help out :) most datacenters do offer remote hands which is a bit pricey, but since they're only needed in emergencies in a redundant setup it is just not required.

9cb14c1ec0 1y ago

Cogent just offered me this colo deal: Full Rack = $100/month* with $500 install, Power (20A) = $350/month with $500 install, DIA (1Gbps) = $300/month Total = $750/month plus $1,000 Install on 12 month term

karterk 1y ago
Where is this, if I may ask?
- kachapopopow 1y ago
  i don't recommend cogent.