[blackfur]

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.

[bubblethink]

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.

[chipdart]

> 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.

[lmm]

> This blog post mentions parking an old switch with a derpy little raspberry pi.

This blogger has weird preferences and money to burn on them. Doesn't mean it's a sensible way to do things if your main aim isn't reminiscing about being a '90s-'00s sysadmin.

[chipdart]

> This blogger has weird preferences and money to burn on them.

I don't know. Spending $100/month on colocation costs is hardly a tophat-wearing level of expense. I recall reading from the old Reddit-to-Lemmy migration discussions that some self-hosting instances were costing that much on AWS, and they are still up.

For perspective, we're in an internet forum where from time to time we get posts of users spending thousands on their home labs.

[jon-wood]

My read of that was that the Raspberry Pi was mostly there for bootstrapping, so that they could drop servers into the rack and have something there already they knew they'd be able to get onto the local network with, not that they were buying colo just for a Raspberry Pi.

[chipdart]

> (...) not that they were buying colo just for a Raspberry Pi.

I don't know. Might be, might be not. All I know is that there are already companies that are even selling colocation specifically for Raspberry Pis. It's not that weird, and not a step too far away from colocating Mac mini instances.

[navaati]

> 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]

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.

[coverband]

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.

[toast0]

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.

[justinclift]

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]

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]

How much power do you get for that?

[justinclift]

Good question. :)

We're using this crowd, and they've been really good: 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.

[Aeolun]

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.

[rwmj]

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.

[navaati]

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.

[vidarh]

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]

We have colo starting from 1U/35€: 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]

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]

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.

[vidarh]

The point was not that it's hard to do. It's that it's hard to do at a price that makes it competitive with renting a dedicated server.

[AmericanChopper]

If you only need one VPS, then you potentially only need a tiny fraction of 1U worth of compute/storage. That’s not a sensible colo use case.

From the DC perspective, the biggest costs for providing colo are power, AC (which is mostly power), network and real estate. Supervising rack access is a very small line item in their accounts.

[vidarh]

Supervising rack access and/or using physical barriers was one of a list of different reasons for why the cost per 1U is so different if you buy 1U rather than a full rack. It may not be the most significant one, but it is there.

As for power, and network, it's often charged separately, and you will still find the 1U vs. full rack difference then. Sure, you can to some extent perhaps assume a slightly lower load factor for customers that rent a full rack, and that may contribute too.

But the point remains: The person above me should not be surprised that renting space by the 1U slot is expensive.

[cm2187]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[consteval]

You're better off self-hosting if your needs are small enough you only require a single machine.

[TZubiri]

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

[9cb14c1ec0]

> 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)

[em500]

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.)

[bakugo]

>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.