[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.