Anyone doing colo?

Mason

I'm interested to see how many people are renting VMs/Dedis or doing colocation. Currently, I am renting high-power VMs, but as I want to scale up and offer VMs myself, the cost of cloud VMs is getting higher (long term) than buying hardware and colo space.

I just toured the DC where I'm deploying my first rack today. It was a wild experience - I had never been in a DC before and they are something else (especially underground ones).

Adrien

Mason i am simply renting BMs for example with Hetzner and have never visited any DC yet so i'm interested to know more about your experience and what you are gaining in terms of financials and performance.
If you don't mind sharing a bit more about all this it would be great. Thanks and congratulations for your 1st rack.

JohnB

Mason

I prefer renting BM or VPS partly because maintence becomes their problem (if they are a good provider). Also if there are critical problems for any reason you can just migrate to another provider. The time constraint is network transfer + restore speed + DNS updates instead of also shipping and installation etc. This isn't an issue if you can afford multiple colo locations. Just restore sites on a failed node to one of the others.

Also I just don't like having all my eggs in one basket. Even if you do everything right, catastrophic failure can happen. I prefer having multiple smaller VPS's across multiple geographic areas and providers. If one node goes down it doesn't affect a huge pecentage of the customers. Keeps overall uptime higher even in disaster situations.

Rich

I think it boils down to if you can afford to buy up a quarter/half/full rack with the power budget that comes with that. Usually the 0.5Amp limit (before charging more) for a 1U is rather anaemic in my opinion and has always put me off.

Mason

Rich

That's something I saw a lot of while searching for providers - entire 42U racks with like 1-2 amps. Ridiculous.

Zoinkies

Are you running Enhance on them? If so, are you running VMs or directly on the metal? Worth it overall?

JohnB

Having multiple locations is important, so for a few years, I will have a hybrid approach. I'll continue to rent from other DCs until I have multiple colo locations set up. Although I might say screw it if this one doesn't work out - another reason to keep the current PoPs. I also don't plan to run any shared hosting directly on metal - I will have everything on VMs for fast recovery if needed (and always have extra compute capacity to take over failed hardware).

Zoinkies

Yes, I have a few. What do you need to know?

JohnB

Mason

I also don't plan to run any shared hosting directly on metal - I will have everything on VMs for fast recovery if needed

Yeah I would do the same. Unfortunately if you use a VPS you lose that easy recovery.

Just be careful. Even if you restore a backup of an enhance VM, it won't reconnect to the control panel server as the old server sometimes. Especially if the IP is different. Also if its the control panel that goes down and you restore, the same issue. They say support can resolve that but its why I don't use enhance in production yet. I don't want disaster recovery time limited by support response time. If you've found a workaround to this I'd be interested.

Mason

JohnB

I'm not using it in production yet - still building a software layer to run on top. A lot of roadmapped features will be done before I am. It'd be cool if disaster recovery options were part of that.

As for VMs - I'll have snapshots along with Enhance backups (remotely stored). Since I control the IPs and networking, I could very quickly re-deploy the most recent snapshot of a VM to a new server with the same IP. However, I'm curious as to why Enhance might not reconnect, even if the IP is the same.

JohnB

Mason When I tested it with the same IP and a restore it had some odd issues. Maybe its been addressed by now.