Comment by lrvick
1 day 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
400k would last me 13 years for a rack, power and 10Gbit/s bandwidth at my colo place (Switzerland, traditionally high prices)
Yes, but that's not their only expense.
Stupid question from me: What are their other costs? I'm a total newbie about data center colo setups, but as I understand, it includes: power and internet access with ingress and egress. Are you thinking their egress will be very high, thus thus need to pay additional bandwidth charges?
Yes, but that’s not the last or only donation they’re receiving either.
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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.
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
Alaska. Dollars per Mbit + reliable power in colo.
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:
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.
Joe's got bought out by Patmos.
The jury's still out on whether or not this is a good thing.
Love finding other metro area folks on hn!
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For a server? The going rate for a 1/4 cabinet is $300-500/month.
If 100 years is fast, yes. You can get pretty sweet colo for 4k per year. I know cheaper places too.
A full rack, 10 gigabits bandwidth and 1920W of power is available for as little as $800/month: https://1530swift.com/colocation.php
Of course you have to buy the switches and servers…