Eeek, I can't imagine what this is like if it scales. What happens to the fire risk when theres 20,000 laptops with aging batteries all sitting together? I hope they take the batteries out, however many laptops use batteries to smooth out power fluctuations.
Laptops aren't designed to be servers - peg your laptop CPU and GPU at 100% and see how long it lasts, I've done this before and the answer is about "2 months", yep sure, this effort isn't targeting that workload, but how many bad apples does it take to start a fire? In their page they say "kubernetes server - no problem" kubernetes DOES keep the CPUs busy, not pegged, but busy enough so that they wont step down their frequency.
I admire the effort to reuse old tech, but boy oh boy would I not want to be a sysadmin here!
I feel like Azure and AWS are both getting worse. I logged into a VM I haven't used in some time and was immediately shocked at just how slowly it rendered even the most basic UI elements.
All the big 3 cloud providers suck if you use them purely as VPS. I’ve tried AWS Lightsail (basically, slightly cheaper EC2) and it’s so much slower than what I’d expect from a similar spec VM from a normal hosting provider.
Hetzner, DigitalOcean, OVH, Vultr are some of the better-known ones. Personally, I’m very happy with SSD Nodes. Paying $90/yr for a 4 vCPU¹ / 16 GB / 320 GB SSD, had some downtime exactly once in two years (they’ve had to switch their IPv4 space in Tokyo). Affiliate link: https://ale.sh/r/ssdnodes
[1]: Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 (4) @ 2.199GHz – not great, I know, but to reiterate: that’s for $90 a year.
Its a page hosted on CLoudFlare's "pages.dev" service. Their method of contact is a Google Form which does have an email address on this domain "CoLaptop [dot] com", but that as a web address does not work.
Maybe it's someone's old project idea that they never got around to finishing, and OP randomly found it and posted it here. Maybe it was never meant to be shared.
> Your old laptop packs more CPU power, RAM, and storage than their entry-level offerings - and with us, you'll pay just €7/month for professional hosting
This is basically the same price as the cheapest options on Hetzner: https://snipboard.io/C9epWo.jpg. Sure my old laptop does have more RAM and a bigger SSD, but I bet it's also less reliable than Hetzner's servers, and is likely to suddenly die some day. So is the tradeoff really worth it? It's hard for me to believe that this is a genuine improvement for most things. The only definite winning case I can think of is if I have a process I want to run, but I don't care if it just suddenly stops working. But when would that ever be the case? and to save a couple dollars per month?
1) You don't have to keep copyrights up to date (and in fact you don't have to put them at all), 2) Every single startup i've seen on HN is sketchy af. Racking laptops in a cage at a Hetzner DC is probably the least sketchy product i've seen here.
And honestly, not a terrible idea, I have old laptops that would work as a VPS. $7/month for somebody to host a public server for me, and not on my crappy residential isp? All I have to lose is an old laptop I haven't touched in 5 years? Sign me up
(they do need a real domain before i'll give them money tho, lol)
> Website copyright is out of date by two years...
Can you explain how a copyright can be "out of date by two years"?
I always thought the copyright notice should reflect the year of creation, and that it's actually bad (from a legal POV) to always show the current year through scripting.
Colocating itself, though isn't new at all. Lots of different ways to host, including servers, mac minis, laptops are conceivable too because they share the same kinds of parts that mac minis might have.
Also, isn't this just a huge fire hazard of they actually do what they claim? Or will they remove the batteries from these old, continually plugged in, poorly cooled laptops?
+ The usual limiting factor in data centers is power, so laptops could be more optimized for greater cycle efficiency per power than comparable old servers.
+ Laptops are generally compact and so achieve greater rack densities than individual co-lo servers. I'm thinking about 34 or 51 laptops could be stored in 9 or 10U either 2 or 3 rows deep by 17 wide.
+ Shipping a laptop to a co-lo data center is cheaper than a 1U server.
~ Reusing electronics saves e-waste and reduces unnecessary consumption, either old servers or old laptops.
- Laptops lack ECC RAM.
- Laptops typically don't use nearly as fast CPUs or RAM as contemporaneous servers.
- Laptops are limited in their storage options.
- Laptops lack remote, lights-out management of real servers.
- Repairing old failed laptop components is more difficult than old servers.
~ Old laptops tend not to have usable batteries, so there's unlikely to be much an inherently distributed battery backup capability.
- Old laptop batteries of various origins could be a li-ion NMC fire hazard at scale.
~ Reusing old stuff at any sort of scale would prefer standardization, and it's sometimes difficult to amass many of the same discontinued model.
Conclusion: Do it if it works for you. It's kinda cool.
I think it's one of those ideas that only works with nostalgia or hoarding impulses to support it.
I think normal virtualization approaches are far more power efficient, at a fleet level, than any kind of cluster of laptop scenarios. You can pile in the cores and amortize the costs of memory controllers etc. over a large set of guests.
It is a funny way to get features of both worlds. One reason to want colo (rather than VMs) is for predictability, but laptops still give you the funny throughput problems, because of thermal throttling instead of competing guests.
uh yeah i mean we 'colo' at work because its cheaper than buying a windows server with multiple RDP licenses. We have some legacy stuff that must be run on site.... so we buy $200 laptops and people can remote in for years.
Not sure if this is legit... I could see it working well enough if they require the laptop to support at least say thunderbolt3/usb4 then they can use a single connection interface to a management/dock interface that includes a network connection (1gb/2.5gb)
The trouble is a lot of laptops won't power-on with the screen closed and have heavy sleep/suspend behaviors in general. Not to mention general airflow in whatever shelving system is used with the laptops, assuming 2-4 laptops per shelf, per 1u. Not to mention, one would probably want/need some means of ensuring appropriate driver support, or an appropriate Linux or other setup for said hardware.
While I can see it working, depending on shipping costs can definitely see some problematic bits.
Old laptops as low cost servers? Absolutely, build a homelab in your own basement, rent a cheap VPS, set up wireguard and viola - instant data center for tens of dollars per month. It's not production grade but you'll learn a ton.
But colocation?
Strip away the learning component and add production uptime requirements - why would you even consider using crusty old laptops for this? If you have production grade needs, look to a standard cloud provider or, at the very least, a colo facility where you can put production-grade equipment.
I have always dreamed of substituting a really expensive rack of servers with a couple of elderly laptops, with their built in UPS, handy screens, keyboards and trackpads. However, for pet projects, I now have a better way of being cheapskate.
Some ecommerce software stacks really need gargantuan amounts of RAM and CPU, which gets expensive on the cloud. However, it is possible with some software to have everything massively cached, with the cloud doing that, with the origin server in my basement, only accessible from the allowed cache arrangement, therefore having the setup reasonably secure and cheap.
Downsides to this, having customer details in the basement rather than a secure facility, but how many developers have huge customer databases just casually lying around on USB sticks and whatnot? It happens.
Don't use "the cloud", rent a moderately-priced server. This "cloud" fetishism (that means AWS/Azure/GCP) has led to billions of dollars in unnecessary revenue for those companies and unnecessary expenses for the rest of the world.
There is no way they are partnering with Hetzner, or charging just 7€/month flat rate... they specifically want to know the model of the laptop, and offer to send send a courrier to your door...
108 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 75.5 ms ] threadLaptops aren't designed to be servers - peg your laptop CPU and GPU at 100% and see how long it lasts, I've done this before and the answer is about "2 months", yep sure, this effort isn't targeting that workload, but how many bad apples does it take to start a fire? In their page they say "kubernetes server - no problem" kubernetes DOES keep the CPUs busy, not pegged, but busy enough so that they wont step down their frequency.
I admire the effort to reuse old tech, but boy oh boy would I not want to be a sysadmin here!
why we must all spend money on domain to show off our projects?
Right now the closest I can see is that $121/mo gets you 4 Xeon Platinum 8370C cores and 16GiB of RAM [0] (storage not included!).
Somebody Geekbenched that config here [1] 1274 single core 4256 multi core.
Thats kinda terrible ngl. A mini pc with last gen mobile parts like Ryzen 5 7640HS gets 2610 single and 10768 multi core [2].
[0] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-ma...
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/17547159
[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/17541586
Hetzner, DigitalOcean, OVH, Vultr are some of the better-known ones. Personally, I’m very happy with SSD Nodes. Paying $90/yr for a 4 vCPU¹ / 16 GB / 320 GB SSD, had some downtime exactly once in two years (they’ve had to switch their IPv4 space in Tokyo). Affiliate link: https://ale.sh/r/ssdnodes
[1]: Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 (4) @ 2.199GHz – not great, I know, but to reiterate: that’s for $90 a year.
Its a page hosted on CLoudFlare's "pages.dev" service. Their method of contact is a Google Form which does have an email address on this domain "CoLaptop [dot] com", but that as a web address does not work.
I'm not sure they have their act together.
This is basically the same price as the cheapest options on Hetzner: https://snipboard.io/C9epWo.jpg. Sure my old laptop does have more RAM and a bigger SSD, but I bet it's also less reliable than Hetzner's servers, and is likely to suddenly die some day. So is the tradeoff really worth it? It's hard for me to believe that this is a genuine improvement for most things. The only definite winning case I can think of is if I have a process I want to run, but I don't care if it just suddenly stops working. But when would that ever be the case? and to save a couple dollars per month?
Edit: Maybe this is what github is doing :P
Announcing the new "mobile" tier on azure.
> © 2024 CoLaptop. All rights reserved.
Website copyright is out of date by two years... And the website has been online since then. https://crt.sh/?q=colaptop.pages.dev
> Thank you for your interest. Please submit the form below and we'll get back to you within 2 working days.
> - Team @ CoLaptop.com
Also colaptop.com is not even registered anymore. If I had to guess the pages.dev site stayed up but the domain and email are nowhere.
And honestly, not a terrible idea, I have old laptops that would work as a VPS. $7/month for somebody to host a public server for me, and not on my crappy residential isp? All I have to lose is an old laptop I haven't touched in 5 years? Sign me up
(they do need a real domain before i'll give them money tho, lol)
Can you explain how a copyright can be "out of date by two years"?
I always thought the copyright notice should reflect the year of creation, and that it's actually bad (from a legal POV) to always show the current year through scripting.
> Website copyright is out of date by two years... And the website has been online since then. https://crt.sh/?q=colaptop.pages.dev
That's exactly what it should be then. A copyright notice lists the year of publication. Not the current year.
> A proper copyright notice consists of three elements: a © symbol, the year of publication, and the copyright owner’s name.
https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/what-is-copyright-notice/
It's fixed now.
And someone bought the .com domain: https://crt.sh/?id=25447880244
There's no way to read this without hearing Scottish accent. It's like a sleeper agent activation phrase.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKfAjlW6E30
Colocating itself, though isn't new at all. Lots of different ways to host, including servers, mac minis, laptops are conceivable too because they share the same kinds of parts that mac minis might have.
+ The usual limiting factor in data centers is power, so laptops could be more optimized for greater cycle efficiency per power than comparable old servers.
+ Laptops are generally compact and so achieve greater rack densities than individual co-lo servers. I'm thinking about 34 or 51 laptops could be stored in 9 or 10U either 2 or 3 rows deep by 17 wide.
+ Shipping a laptop to a co-lo data center is cheaper than a 1U server.
~ Reusing electronics saves e-waste and reduces unnecessary consumption, either old servers or old laptops.
- Laptops lack ECC RAM.
- Laptops typically don't use nearly as fast CPUs or RAM as contemporaneous servers.
- Laptops are limited in their storage options.
- Laptops lack remote, lights-out management of real servers.
- Repairing old failed laptop components is more difficult than old servers.
~ Old laptops tend not to have usable batteries, so there's unlikely to be much an inherently distributed battery backup capability.
- Old laptop batteries of various origins could be a li-ion NMC fire hazard at scale.
~ Reusing old stuff at any sort of scale would prefer standardization, and it's sometimes difficult to amass many of the same discontinued model.
Conclusion: Do it if it works for you. It's kinda cool.
I think normal virtualization approaches are far more power efficient, at a fleet level, than any kind of cluster of laptop scenarios. You can pile in the cores and amortize the costs of memory controllers etc. over a large set of guests.
It is a funny way to get features of both worlds. One reason to want colo (rather than VMs) is for predictability, but laptops still give you the funny throughput problems, because of thermal throttling instead of competing guests.
> - Repairing old failed laptop components is more difficult than old servers.
I think "run it until it's dead" kind of thing.
The trouble is a lot of laptops won't power-on with the screen closed and have heavy sleep/suspend behaviors in general. Not to mention general airflow in whatever shelving system is used with the laptops, assuming 2-4 laptops per shelf, per 1u. Not to mention, one would probably want/need some means of ensuring appropriate driver support, or an appropriate Linux or other setup for said hardware.
While I can see it working, depending on shipping costs can definitely see some problematic bits.
- Mount something in a rack not firmly attached to brackets or a shelf
- Install anything with a battery larger than you'd find in a RAID card
Not to mention all the other ways this is sub-par in terms of airflow, density, serviceability, out-of-band management, etc.
I get the allure of it, but I wouldn't really want my gear anywhere near a bunch of laptops stuck in a cabinet.
> We might modify your laptop to remove or power down the battery
I wonder if Hetzner knows their aim.
> We might modify your laptop to remove or power down the battery, wireless radios, etc. to ensure it can be used safely in the data center.
Yeah, just use the DC's UPS.
But colocation?
Strip away the learning component and add production uptime requirements - why would you even consider using crusty old laptops for this? If you have production grade needs, look to a standard cloud provider or, at the very least, a colo facility where you can put production-grade equipment.
Some ecommerce software stacks really need gargantuan amounts of RAM and CPU, which gets expensive on the cloud. However, it is possible with some software to have everything massively cached, with the cloud doing that, with the origin server in my basement, only accessible from the allowed cache arrangement, therefore having the setup reasonably secure and cheap.
Downsides to this, having customer details in the basement rather than a secure facility, but how many developers have huge customer databases just casually lying around on USB sticks and whatnot? It happens.
Put an openwrt router in front of your fat server, and for each query it sends a WOL packet to the box, and add some delay to an ethernet bridge.
That was the fat server is mostly sleeping, and only woken up when needed.
There is no way they are partnering with Hetzner, or charging just 7€/month flat rate... they specifically want to know the model of the laptop, and offer to send send a courrier to your door...