[perrygeo]

Old laptops as low cost servers? Absolutely, build a homelab in your own basement, rent a cheap VPS, set up wireguard and viola - instant data center for tens of dollars per month. It's not production grade but you'll learn a ton.

But colocation?

Strip away the learning component and add production uptime requirements - why would you even consider using crusty old laptops for this? If you have production grade needs, look to a standard cloud provider or, at the very least, a colo facility where you can put production-grade equipment.

[GTP]

They aren't targeting big companies for sure, but maybe a small or medium-sized office could make use of this.

[perrygeo]

I don't see it. Hobby projects can use a VPN tunnel to make a data center from local equipment. Real projects that choose colocation have uptime requirements that simply can't be met by random consumer hardware. The venn diagrams don't intersect.

There's no middle ground where you try to run a real business on old laptops. That's insane. You either keep things small/hobby and stay simple, or graduate to production-grade equipment once you have real requirements.

The middle ground, taking on production colocation problems plus the unreliability of random hardware, sounds like the worst of both worlds. There are both simpler and more robust options.

[AussieWog93]

The problem with hosting locally is using residential internet.

In Australia, for example, we're capping out at 100Mbit/s upload speeds on plans that cost ~US$70/mo and regularly go down for maintenance.

In other countries with cheap symmetrical plans this may make more sense.

[fabioz]

Initially I believe Google was known for getting unreliable hardware with good software to manage it (a single laptop probably won't cut it, but a bunch of laptops scattered around the globe could be interesting -- when you grow things fail all the time anyways).

[justsomehnguy]

They aren't targeting no one (and looks like they aren't at all).

Just do the math: for a measly €2000 a month, a salary of a cashier in Amsterdam, you already need to have 285 clients - and this is without taxes and revenue.

[Theodores]

I have always dreamed of substituting a really expensive rack of servers with a couple of elderly laptops, with their built in UPS, handy screens, keyboards and trackpads. However, for pet projects, I now have a better way of being cheapskate.

Some ecommerce software stacks really need gargantuan amounts of RAM and CPU, which gets expensive on the cloud. However, it is possible with some software to have everything massively cached, with the cloud doing that, with the origin server in my basement, only accessible from the allowed cache arrangement, therefore having the setup reasonably secure and cheap.

Downsides to this, having customer details in the basement rather than a secure facility, but how many developers have huge customer databases just casually lying around on USB sticks and whatnot? It happens.

[pocksuppet]

Don't use "the cloud", rent a moderately-priced server. This "cloud" fetishism (that means AWS/Azure/GCP) has led to billions of dollars in unnecessary revenue for those companies and unnecessary expenses for the rest of the world.

[PhilippGille]

> it is possible with some software to have everything massively cached, with the cloud doing that, with the origin server in my basement, only accessible from the allowed cache arrangement

Do you mean a setup like:

    client -> cloud(HAProxy+Varnish) -WireGuard-> basement(backend)

Or something else?

[zoobab]

"build a homelab in your own basement, rent a cheap VPS, set up wireguard and viola"

Put an openwrt router in front of your fat server, and for each query it sends a WOL packet to the box, and add some delay to an ethernet bridge.

That was the fat server is mostly sleeping, and only woken up when needed.