Comment by arjie
16 hours 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.
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.