| If it's for personal or pilot projects: find a third-tier, cheap co-lo within 100 mi / 161 km of your usual location. Buy some used enterprise boxes off eBay / UNIX Surplus / etc. that don't draw too much power. Data is cheap (unless you're being screwed or you don't lease your own glass). It's electricity that costs $$$. If it's for something that makes some, but not a metric ton of, money: find a second-tier co-lo within about 50 mi / 80 km of your usual location. If it's for something that makes a metric f-ton of money: stick to a hybrid, well-managed mix of VPS and co-lo, preferably from a good vendor. Currently, I have a home virtualization/workstation box: - 2x EPYC 7402 + Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 (dual fans) - Supermicro H11DSi v2 (-NT works too if you want dual 10 GbE or NVMe OCuLink) - 512 GiB Samsung RAM - 4x HGST 14 TB HDD - 2x FireCuda 520 1 TB - Thermaltake Core V71 TG case w/ default fans & fan controller removed, modded with extra holes to support the board - 4x 200mm Noctua fans modded to fit within the top and front panels - 5.25" fan controller + 4 temp probes + 4 temp alarms - 2U/tower Smart UPS 1500 with quality new batteries, NMC 2 w/ env monitoring, 2nd temp/humidity sensor and a WiFi bridge (TL-WR802N v4; overkill maximus) - Looking at Intel Optanes for ZIL and some Samsungs for L2ARC - Also looking at a 4U Supermicro 36x 3.5" bay for FreeNAS usage When you need an OpenBSD or opn/pfSense jumpbox/VPN(es), find (a) minimal, supported good box(es) and stick an Intel X710 series card in it because virtualized jumpboxes maybe too converged for some use-cases. Also, Intel QAT cards can be helpful for TLS termination, edge firewall, and some VPN/SSH jumpboxes in use-cases where (mostly older) CPUs can't push accelerated crypto bits fast enough. Off the top of my head, some of the colo's I've used: - Bytemark - Rackspace - Pair - Equinix ($$ IIRC) Also, random ones in SF, SJC, Sacramento, and other cities that escape me right now. |