Colocation: Non-Clown Hosting

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Economics of Colocation vs Dedicated/Cloud

  • Many report that single‑server colo is significantly more expensive than renting a dedicated server or VPS, especially in major cities.
  • Colo becomes cost‑effective when:
    • You need lots of disks (tens–hundreds of TB) and already own or amortize drives.
    • You need high‑end or specialized hardware (e.g., big RAM, GPUs, custom storage) that’s uneconomical to rent.
    • You fill a large fraction of a rack; per‑U pricing improves with scale.
  • Others argue that cheap dedicated servers are often old/buggy and that good refurbished hardware in colo can be better value over 5+ years.
  • Several note that cloud can be cheaper on TCO for small/medium workloads once you count labor, maintenance, and scaling convenience, especially with spot/preemptible instances.

Scale, Audience, and Use Cases

  • General consensus: colo is primarily for racks and businesses, not single VPS equivalents.
  • Good fits mentioned: GPU farms, heavy storage, running your own ASN/peering, serious homelabs, long‑lived services (email, CI, Git, game servers).
  • Poor fits: “just a Raspberry Pi,” simple hobby sites, or a single small VM.

Home Hosting vs Datacenter

  • Many advocate just hosting under a desk or in a basement for light workloads, leveraging cheap fiber where available.
  • Tradeoffs:
    • Pros: lowest cost, immediate physical access, good enough for low‑traffic services.
    • Cons: power/internet outages, weaker physical security, sometimes bad peering.

Networking, CGNAT, and Workarounds

  • Carrier‑grade NAT is common in some regions, especially mobile and some fixed‑wireless; it complicates home hosting.
  • Workarounds discussed: cheap VPS as a bastion, tunneling tools (WireGuard, Tailscale, others), reverse tunnels, or simply choosing ISPs with public IPv4/IPv6.

Operational Considerations

  • Strong emphasis on:
    • Out‑of‑band access (IPMI, serial consoles, VPN to management LAN).
    • “Real” server hardware (ECC RAM, IPMI, hot‑swap drives) for reliability.
    • Backups from day one (to home servers and/or backup services).
  • Some celebrate never touching hardware again and prefer cloud APIs; others value hands‑on control and learning.

Market, Pricing, and Accessibility

  • Colo pricing varies widely by location; power costs (e.g., in Germany) can dominate.
  • Complaints that many providers hide prices or won’t talk below half/full racks; this deters hobbyists.
  • Examples shared of specific deals (cheap cabinets, 1U offerings, coworking‑style colo) and interest in prepaid or hard‑cap plans for risk‑free experimentation (e.g., for kids).