Comment by lrvick

1 month ago

400K would go -fast- if they stuck to a traditional colo setup. Donations like this are rare and it may be all they get for a decade.

Personally I would feel better about round robin across multiple maintainer-home-hosted machines.

27 comments

lrvick

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Aurornis  1 month ago

> 400K would go -fast- if they stuck to a traditional colo setup.

I don’t know where you’re pricing coloration, but I could host a single server indefinitely from the interest alone on $400K at the (very nice) data centers I’ve used.

Collocation is not that expensive. I’m not understanding how you think $400K would disappear “fast” unless you think it’s thousands of dollars per month?

pilif  1 month ago

400k would last me 13 years for a rack, power and 10Gbit/s bandwidth at my colo place (Switzerland, traditionally high prices)

arjie  1 month ago

I, personally, have a cabinet in a colo. With $400k, I can host it at that datacentre with the income from risk-free return never exercising the capital with 10 GigE, 3 kW of power. If I can do it, they can do it.

Modern computers are super efficient. A 9755 has 128 cores and you can get it for cheap. If you've been doing this for a while you'd have gotten the RAM for cheap too.

If I, a normie, can have terabytes of RAM and hundreds of cores in a colo, I'm pretty sure they can unless they have some specific requests.

And dude, I'm in the Bay Area. Think about that. I'm in one of the highest cost localities and I can do this. I bet there are Colorado or Washington DCs that are even cheaper.

  • lrvick  1 month ago

    I to am in the bay area, and clearly I have been shopping at the wrong colos. I expected to find nothing with unlimited bandwidth for under $1k/mo given past experience with what may have been higher end DCs.

    In any event if I was the volunteer sysadmin that had to babysit the box, I would rather have it at my home with business fiber where I am on premises most of the time because getting in and out of a colo is always a whole thing if their security is worth a damn.

    Even given a frugal and accessible setup like that I can imagine 400k lasting 5 years tops especially if paying for the volunteers business fiber and much more especially given I expect some of it is to provide a sustainable compensation to key team members as well. Every cent will count.

silisili  1 month ago

For reference, in the US at least, there was/is a company called Joes Data Center in KC who would colo a 1U for $30 or $40 a month. I'd used them for years before not needing it anymore, so not some fly by night company(despite the name).

At that rate, that would buy you nearly 1000 years of hosting.

  • Aurornis  1 month ago

    I was trying to avoid naming exact prices because it becomes argument fodder, but locally I can get good quality colo for $50/month and excellent quality coloration with high bandwidth and good interconnects for under $100 for 1U

    I really don’t know where the commenter above was getting the idea that $400K wouldn’t last very long

  • throwaway2037  1 month ago

    Those prices are rock bottom! For that price, what do you get for (a) power budget, (b) Internet connectivity, (c) ingress and egress per month?

    I Googled for that brand and got a few hits:

        - https://inflect.com/building/1325-tracy-avenue-kansas-city/joes-datacenter/datacenter/joes-datacenter
    - https://www.linkedin.com/company/joesdatacenter/
    - https://www.facebook.com/joesdatacenter/

    The homepage now redirects here: https://patmos.tech/

    Another under appreciated point about that data center: It has excellent geographical location to cover North America.

jeltz  1 month ago

If 100 years is fast, yes. You can get pretty sweet colo for 4k per year. I know cheaper places too.