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Comment by fswd | Hacker News Reader

I rent server rack space at a datacenter where I have a beefy workstation to do all my work. I use VS Code Remote and SSH port forwarding. The workstation has fast 2TB NVMe and 64gb of ram, 16 cores and a RTX GPU. It's actually cheaper and faster than our production cloud server.

I tried Github Codespaces and thought it was cool but wasn't nearly as fast as my remote workstation.

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Almost the same for me. The data center is a couple miles from my home and my home has fiber. It’s low latency, I almost never notice a difference from my device. Maybe if I used it for really large files but that’s not my thing. It’s nice keeping my local device crud free and low demand.

Edit to add; cost me about $70/month depending on a few variables on collocation for a 4U. My same apps on AWS would cost 10x more. So that’s plenty of budget for my hardware that I usually get a year or two out of; doing minor repairs/upgrades myself.

Where are you colocating? Looking for one myself

I’d recommend you approach it from a hyperlocal perspective, find the local data center you think will be best for you then look up who is offering colo out of that data center. Then do some network testing. Maybe compare a couple data centers. The providers are going to vary in most cases. So I don’t recommend looking for a specific provider just because it works for me or someone else. You’ll get to pick your bandwidth provider too in many cases.

I like to make sure the network hop path to my home is as direct as possible. My ISP has a large presence in one of the local “backbone” data centers so that’s where I find the best results. But still do testing, it’s not all about location when it comes to latency. If you visit the data centers, or online, they often list names of colo providers. They’re often rather small shops and not large brands so going to be very location specific

How do you find datacenters which will let you colocate hardware? How much hardware do you have? What was the cost?

I'm really interested in this kind of thing.

Can't answer the latter questions as I'm not OP, but you could start finding a colo here if you're looking at the cheaper end of things:

https://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=131

Also just googling "[major city name] colocation" will usually find results, though be warned pricing is often "call us" vs. stated upfront.

Beefy HEDT/workstation with ssh running are amazing dev environments. Vscode remote ssh or even vim make it a dream.

Too bad Intellij requires the Ultimate version of their software to use their equivalent of the VScode server/client feature.

Don’t worry about the price. It’s absolute crap. [At least PyCharm remote is and I believe it has the same underlying Jetbrains architecture]

Windows randomly quit, take forever to open, there are always indexing issues, etc. Locally everything is great, but remote is completely unstable.

I think it has you install something on the server if you want to, and it's more reliable. But yeah, completely in different league from vscode.

What's the advantage of having the workstation at a datacenter in this context?

$60/yr vs thousands of $ upfront for a comparable desktop or notebook machine.

Not to mention the superior network connectivity (10 gigabit/s). In fact, there are no 10gbps options from the common last mile carriers available at any price (AT&T, Crapcast). And if they did offer it, it'd probably be $500USD/mo+ just for Internet.

AT&T has a 5gbps fiber plan available for $250USD+/mo, but there are very few (>10 fractional portions of cities nationally) areas where it is offered today.

If you have a strong enough desire for cost-effective, really fucking fast Internet for a fair price, move to Korea. In .kr you can get 10gig for something like $30-50USD/mo.

Edit: Oops, my bad. I meant to reply to this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37934982.

> Step 1. Create an Oracle Cloud account Step 2. Create an Ampere 6 core, 32gb memory instance for like $5/mo Step 3. Use Jetbrains Gateway to run your IDE as a thin client, executing on that host.

> You get a pretty darn beefy ARM64 VM instance from OCI for extremely cheap. You can get these in a region near you, with low latency. And Jetbrains Gateway works pretty great.

We use OCI, aka Oracle Cloud. As a customer, OCI is more financially appealing compared to the competition (AWS, Azure) for bare compute infra. Not as cheap as OVH, if that fits your requirements. For me though, OCI is preferred because it provides all the standard cloud building blocks of multi-region + (cheap) object storage + block storage.

I mean, fuck Oracle and Larry Ellison, right? That said, building and operating a cloud at scale is a lot of work and I'll leverage their work as long as it makes fiscal sense.

The commenter posted about a self-installed machine. Also, colocating GPU servers is expensive, because it's billed at roughly $75 per amp per month, and a typical machine with a single 280W GPU will use about 5 amps at peak.

That sounds really low. Do you mind sharing where you rent your racks from?

I was thinking the same. I'm paying about $1600/mo for a 42U rack, 2 x 30A Feeds, and 60mb/s 95th percentile, ipv4 + ipv6

> The workstation has fast 2TB NVMe and 64gb of ram, 16 cores and a RTX GPU.

> $60/yr vs thousands of $ upfront for a comparable desktop or notebook machine.

I don't think we're talking about the same things here.

I paid $5000 for the workstation (2019) and upgraded to NVMe later, and I pay $0 for the datacenter because I have referred clients to their business and established a relationship over the years. Because when people find out how much cheaper it is to skip the cloud, they switch but don't know where to go.

I could upgrade to dual 2.5 GigE but I have nothing that needs that much bandwidth. I can download 30gb from hugging face in a few minutes which doesn't bother me.

The DC is about to onboard another client of mine, a startup that ran on AWS credits for 9 months. They are upgrading to a 64 core 2TB ram box that was an extra the DC had, for $3500, which will probably go into the rack next to mine.

Where are you seeing these prices? OVH seems way more than what you’re saying, but might be looking at the wrong thing

Intellij Ultimate edition costs more than the server at this point. Wish they'd bring this over to Community and Android Studio.

nice - I've also found VS Code Remote + SSH to be pretty fantastic

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