Getting strong vibes of Asimov’s novel "The Gods Themselves" here ! For those who haven’t read it I recommend it. It’s a nice little self-contained book, not a grandiose series and universe, but I love it.
You can get 25G switches/router for not much nowadays, check Mikrotik. Throw a couple Intel NICs from ebay in your machines' PCIe ports and really it's not that much of a deal.
Please be aware that this doesn't include electricity and cooling, which is really expensive in Germany. They charge 0.476€/kWh. Running a single 4090 @ 450W 24/7 would add another ~150€/month.
Yes, that's my biggest "let down" with this writing: at least in my corner of the world (Paris), colo starts at 300€/month for something reasonable, or at the very least 100€ for low power 1U (so you can host... a switch). That's as much as a rent !
On the other hand you can get a nice enough dedicated server for 15€/month.
So yeah, if I'm missing something please tell me because I'd love to but I can't justify the price for hobby stuff.
Co-location has never scaled down to 1U very well, because of the overheads - you can't just let trust 40+ customers to slide their 1U server into the same rack without security concerns and/or losing lots of space, and having extra work with power distribution and networking that the customers themselves are responsible for with a full rack.
Just access arrangement for 40x more customers adds up in admin overheads, and colocation isn't really a tech play as much as it's a real-estate play similar to parking where the goal is minimum effort rent-extraction with as little staff as possible...
Regarding security aspect, as for what customer can do: you can bring your device and put it in shared rack while support personnel accompanies you. Power/Ethernet and if keyboard/screen is needed will be managed/connected/wired only by support staff.
One can rent a whole rack if you want dedicated access. And 1/2 or 1/4 racks are available if fullsize is not needed.
That the price for 1U will tend to not be very competitive with renting dedicated servers (I can rent a server including hosting for that price) because the overheads to the provider of subdividing that 42U rack adds up. The point wasn't that the security can't be dealt with, but that dealing with it is one more thing that contributes to a higher cost per U if you rent 1U than if you rent quarter rack or more.
A 1U can very easily contain 64+ physical cores, many TB of storage, and a few hundred GB of RAM. A 1U colo can be a great deal if you’re looking to use that much compute/storage.
The admin for those arrangements is pretty simple really. Even if you’re providing supervised access, it’s not going to be much work. I run several small colo deployments like this, and I probably only visit the sites every couple of years.
If you only need one VPS, then you potentially only need a tiny fraction of 1U worth of compute/storage. That’s not a sensible colo use case.
From the DC perspective, the biggest costs for providing colo are power, AC (which is mostly power), network and real estate. Supervising rack access is a very small line item in their accounts.
Supervising rack access and/or using physical barriers was one of a list of different reasons for why the cost per 1U is so different if you buy 1U rather than a full rack. It may not be the most significant one, but it is there.
As for power, and network, it's often charged separately, and you will still find the 1U vs. full rack difference then. Sure, you can to some extent perhaps assume a slightly lower load factor for customers that rent a full rack, and that may contribute too.
But the point remains: The person above me should not be surprised that renting space by the 1U slot is expensive.
It depends what you do with it. If you only need a small VM to manage your emails nothing will beat a VPS. But I also use it for offsite backup, so need a bit of storage. When you add dozens of TB, dedicated quickly becomes way more expensive. Particularly given that I tend to park there old hard drives which cost I have already amortised.
If you buy your drives smartly that's amortised after 8 months. When you are looking at the cost over 5 years, it is hard to beat colocation for specialised hardware.
I'm ignoring upfront cost here, and going based on the premise of 100€-300€ as the monthly fee for colocation. You can't amortize your way out of that.
Do you know https://wokwi.com/ ? I have found support for the -C3, and even Rust development. Although it's online, if you are looking for local stuff I don't know if what they use is available, or if it's a secret sauce.
It's secret sauce. They're sort of working on a commercial offline offering, but tbh I think it's a one man band and I wasn't super impressed with the quality level. Which is a shame because the idea is great.
It does not help you having a perfect and exact rule from initial conditions to future prediction... if you cannot have a complete and exact description of your initial conditions.
We might never be able to get this exact description of the internal state of a brain, this is what makes perfect prediction impossible.
At the most basic level, your process is in the D or S states rather than R state. Cloudlflare workers are not exactly Unix processes, but the same concept applies.
Hi, one probably really wants to use libvirt rather than qemu directly. That way you can create your VMs remotely with a GUI (virt-manager) using a ssh-based libvirt url, or a CLI (virsh) and it will handle all the right parameters for qemu, the required networking setup, etc. Check it out !
as @wmf correctly stated "If the OP was running a virtual desktop on a server with no GPU then they probably had to fall back to software rendering which can be slow. This isn't QEMU's fault per se; if you physically don't have a GPU then you don't have a GPU."
and 99% cheap servers in the wild dont have a GPU or even hardware graphic card
I'm the same way with whisky. I might have to imitate the professional tasters: just swirl and spit. Seems like a travesty but less so than letting my collection gather dust indefinitely.
