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Comment by chris_engel | Hacker News Reader

Colocation, I don't know... Without questioning peoples preferences but I think at that point I'd rather look for a decent fiber network connection for my home and let that raspberry run in my own cupboard. I mean, its a RASPBERRY you would probably do fine even without the fiber connection.

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It depends what it is. I have 25/25 fiber at home for practically nothing (~70 USD a month) but I can only go so far even with a UPS. If I loose power for too long or my internet goes down I have no backup which I would have at a co-location facility.

If those circumstances occur, what would you be serving that can't afford to go offline for a couple days?

It's important to have an answer to that question, rather than to assume that being offline when your home internet is down is inherently a problem. You can safely estimate using "X nines will cost X digits per month":

1 nines, 36.5 days/year downtime is $#/month. (openwifi tier)

2 nines, 3.65 days/year downtime is $##/month. (residential tier)

3 nines, 9 hours/year downtime; are $###/month. (commercial tier, datacenter tier)

4 nines, 1 hour/year downtime, is $####/month. (datacenter tier)

5 nines, 5 minutes/year downtime, is $#####/month. (carrier tier)

Speaking from experience, it's both important to decide which 'nines' you require before you invest in making things more resilient — and it's important to be able to say things to yourself like, for example, "I don't care if it's down 4 days per year, so I won't spend more than $##/month on hosting it".

It's always a surprise to me how expensive internet access can be in the US. Here in France 1Gb/700Mb fiber connection costs 30€/month (and this is without commitment and includes TV stuff - "more than 180 channels" whatever that means, and landline phone)

The US has been specializing in telco monopolies in particular for the past hundred and fifty years or so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfinity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon

etc.

The EU invested pretty heavily into making sure even very remote parts of Europe, like northern Finland, have great Internet. I was very pleasantly surprised when I was able to work from home at the in-laws'!

thouh there are places near berlin that have to make due with 16mbps dsl

Because of these new subsidised fiber deployments, it's not uncommon anymore for rural/semi-rural areas to have better connectivity than urban or sub-urban areas, which is bit awkward.

The US invested very heavily too, it's just that the money poof! Disappeared!

Internet speeds and prices are all over the place in the US. I pay $60 per month for 1Gb synchronous fiber (which really performs at 1.2 synchronous, yay me) at my house and $60 per month for 500/30 cable internet at my rental. Two different areas three postal codes apart with different vendors, prices, and products (even when the vendor is available in both).

The way we sliced up space for utilities (lots of legal shared monopolies/guided capitalism) and their desire to build the last mile in their area leads to many different prices and products within a walkable distance. Before that 500/30 service showed up the best we had was unreliable 200/15 from another provider.

I think you mean symmetric fiber

I'm fairly sure that person is Swiss, because CHF converted to USD is ~70USD for 25Gb/25Gb symmetrical Fiber in Switzerland.

Regular 1Gb/1Gb is around 40CHF/40EUR often.

it helps that France is the size of Texas

I'm not sure size matters that much. Population density does indeed.

and it varies widely. I pay $170 a month for 30mbps down and 15 up lmao and I have 2 options to choose from who have the exact same service for the exact same price. Telecoms in the US is beyond horrifyingly bad.

A 2200VA/1320W UPS will run a macmini on full load (50watts) for 2 hours. So it's safe to say 12-20 hours under normal load.

What does 25/25 mean here? Gbps feels high for the home, but Mbps feels insanely expensive at that rate. (And also I didn't know they did fiber that slow, it's really only available in 1 Gbps and sometimes 500 Mbps here)

probably this

https://www.init7.net/en/internet/fiber7/

they explicitly (used to?) market that they don't throttle but simply connect at line-speed "because we can"

Damn, that sounds nice, the fiber in Switzerland linked to in other comment.

Though the small cost is probably overshadowed by the large infra costs at home. So now you need a 25Gbp/s router, together with the rest of topology like qsfp+ switches, and then actually computers with >= 25Gb/s nics to make use of it. And then all the appropriate cooling for it. It’s starting to sound a lot like a home data center :P

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.

I don't see why 25Gbps symmetric would be so surprising. My current ISP Ziply Fiber offers 100Mbps, 300Mbps, 1Gbps, 2Gbps, 5Gbps, 10Gbps, and 50Gbps (all of them symmetric) in most of their service areas. I’m sure there are other providers with similar offerings, in some parts of the country. My previous ISP, Sonic.net, offers speeds up to 10Gbps. The reported price is pretty nice though.

I was looking for an UPS replacement and found this: Anker 521 Portable Power Station. Haven't decided what brand to buy, bit $200 sounds reasonable.

These days I'm less excited about residential fiber deployments as they are more often than not some passive optical setup, which is worlds apart from a proper active fiber that you'd get in a DC or a dedicated business line. For example standard 10G-PON is asymmetric shared 10G down/2.5G up (10G-EPON is even worse, 10G/1G asymmetric), with up to 128 way split. That means that with your fancy fiber in the worst case you might get barely 20 Mbps upload capacity.

> in the worst case you might get barely 20 Mbps upload capacity

"in the worst case" being the key point, and frankly, 20 Mbps doesn't actually sound too bad as the theoretical minimum.

In practice you're unlikely to hit situations where this is a problem even if everyone was hosting their blog/homelab/SaaS/etc.

This is only a problem (and your ISP will end up giving you hell for it) if you're hosting a media service and are maxing out the uplink 24/7. For most services (even actual SaaS) it's unlikely to be the case.

I’m on Comcast cable internet and 20Mbps is my maximum with 12Mbps peak and 8Mbps sustained being more typical.

It wouldn’t work for high bandwidth hosting, but works fine for residential and for 4 simultaneous video calls mostly all-day long during COVID.

IME most new residential fiber deployments in the US are using XGS-PON which provides 10 Gbps in both directions. Typically ISPs don't put the maximum number of clients in a node that the standard allows. I've heard 32 is a common number in practice.

Obviously it'd still be a bad idea to run a high traffic server on a residential connection, but as long as you're not streaming 4K video 24/7 or something you'll probably be OK.

Here proper fiber is the norm. Doesn't mean that it's not oversubscribed to the next hop though, typical oversubscription is 30x, it would be insanely expensive of they didn't do it.

I get some horrendous peering at home, and proper DC networking is not going to have that problem.

Good luck with your sdcard and what not. Just get a nuc or macmini.

SD cards are indeed a really bad deal when it comes to reliability, especially if like me you tend to slam raspis everywhere almost as a reflex: before you know it, you end up with a large-ish fleet of the things in your house.

But: Raspis these days work 100% fine with SSD's, and while a small SSD is not yet as cheap as an SD card, it's not far off.

I have entirely stopped using SD cards for my Raspis for quite a long while now.

I also had good experience setting up PIs with read-only root devices. All data needs to be sent off-device (or at least onto external storage), but it wasn’t too tricky and should avoid the usual SD-card issues.

PSA: if you're having RPi SD-card-corruption issues, get a higher-amperage power supply (the official power supplies work well). Low-voltage warnings are a telltale sign.

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