I’ve been renting compute by the hour on Vast.ai and often wonder about the servers I use. Is it reasonable to assume that any such server with, say, a 90+% reliability rating is in a data center, rather than someone’s basement?
The last 2 are really well solved.
It's crazy what's possible with USFF machines as mini-blade servers.
Low electricity and really serviceable redundancy and failover.
I would guess most home labs are at or near 99% availability on hardware.
Scale is part of it too. I could pack my homelab into the car and take it to a friends house. They have the space, power service, and internet to accommodate me. A full data center doesn’t have that option, at least not for free-ish.
When you can buy 4 USFFs for the price of 1 new one, and run 2 have have a test one, and one for spares I'm not really sure what everyone is concerned about.
Enterprise, engineering, industrial grade equipment is the same high quality level, be it a server or a desktop meant for extreme environments.
Too many people are only purchasers of consumer grade equipment and would be surprised at what a huge difference the corporate/engineering/industry spec stuff is like.