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.
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.
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 ><.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.