[PaulHoule]

So many people want to believe in this sort of thing for various reasons that I get fatigued at the very thought of trying to explain to people who believe in it earnestly that it is not a good idea. (e.g. commercial hosting services are really competitive; for a long time the cost of computing has been going down over time though I don't know if that is reversing because we've hit the end of the real Moore's law [1] or if it is a temporary blip)

[1] the motor behind it is cost reduction, once that stops it stops because we can't afford it anymore!

[oceanplexian]

Well, it exists, but it exists if you’re willing to buy server hardware on eBay, hustle to get old parts working together, negotiate a good deal on a cabinet, get space from ARIN and announce it and so on. There are probably 10-50x cost efficiencies vs. renting 5 year old CPU families on AWS at huge markup.

A laptop isn’t the way to do that though. And your typical VC-fueled startup isn’t going to know how to do it either. It takes a very narrow slice of competence to be able to do that correctly.

[jeron]

the one guy I know who has worked with colo at scale (unfortunately in the crypto space) is now an EM at Goog