alt Hacker NewsOld laptops in a colo as low cost servers
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This seems very sketchy. Give us your laptop and we promise we won't keep it...
> © 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Website copyright is out of date by two years...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.
> 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?
Edit: Maybe this is what github is doing :P
I work for IPinfo and we operate a distributed network consisting of around 1,400 servers. I think we have reached a point where it is extremely hard for us purchase VPSes from interesting ASNs.
To support lots of ISPs, universities, and different organizations we have been asking them if they have an old laptop lying around that they can host our software on. Goal is to reach 70,000 probes within the next couple of years.
It is a simple probe software and we share some data or we can pay 20-30 bucks a month for it. We have a couple of NUCs in remote regions but no laptops yet. Basically, we are even happy if an ISP (or any one) hosts our software from a laptop dangling by a charging cable from a socket in some random corner.
We can send over a RPI or NUC, but with remote hands, and setup and all that it can get quite expensive. So, we always first ask if they have an old laptop lying around and can install our software there.
For us, at least, we are not interested in the hardware aspect. We are interested in the network. The old laptop approach only acts as a last resort. We will be more than happy to go with the predictability of a traditional VPS hosted in a traditional data center. Colocation, no matter what form it takes, involves a lot of moving parts.
Great idea but is this real?
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.
The advantage of a laptop is exactly that you can easily host it at home, and own everything. I have one - with an UPS also holding the router and fiber optic and an external HDD. I'm actually working right now to version 2.0 which is a beefed up version - still used laptop (found a great deal on a lenovo P1), but slightly more expensive and I'm waiting on some parts to upgrade. Should be able to even hold the production environment in a pinch.
Ah, and obviously you put a claude/codex on it, so your actual work is just ... installing claude, and maybe a linux. The rest is done by the AI - setup, scripting etc.
As a colocated option... I see it work for some people. But it'd be a niche offering, when the whole value proposition is "make my own, with blackjack and hookers".
Ran an old laptop as home server for years.
It’s OKish as a starting point into selfhosted world but overall not ideal. The battery is a fire risk and the entire thermal design isn’t really geared towards 24/7 operation.
Not really something I’d co locate unless it was a DC physically near me so that stopping by is easy
The folks that run the colo I keep our servers in would beat me to death with a shoe if I did either of these things:
- 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.
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.
Have an old Mac book pro sitting in my office as a self hosted Mac GitHub runner and it works great.
My biggest complaint used to be that it would occasionally restart after a system update and I’d have to unlock FileVault in person, but macOS 26 now allows unlocks over ssh.
Just gonna point this out since I noticed it a few weeks ago and notice is still there, Hetzner has paused selling new colocation service: https://www.hetzner.com/colocation/
So this is probably a joke site or a scam.
Funny, I had a similar idea this morning in the shower. I was thinking about how distributed digital infrastructure could be achieved in practice. Running some music streaming and photo server on an old laptop at home that I access via tailscale has proved surprisingly smooth. I feel there is some future in empowering users by giving them access to a cloud on hardware that is actually owned by the user. It would be a way to achieve absolute digital freedom, no lock-in and if done in a secure way privacy friendly. Hell it's the OG idea of the internet! The question is how to bring this to non-technical users. I know many people who are getting sick of paying each month both to Apple and Google for storing their ever growing pile of pictures. This solution of course does imply some sort of lock-in as your tied to a subscription and it's probably quite the hassle to get your laptop back. Also the fire hazard seems like a legit concern. I nevertheless do hear some music here.
> We're based in Amsterdam and aim to work with Hetzner
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.
Suppose we set aside the concerns in this thread about the legitimacy of this.
How would this work when the old hardware inevitably needs to be serviced (mechanical hard drive failure, memory errors, dust buildup, etc)?
Would they have technicians on-site available to service whatever random laptop you send them? If your laptop dies do they ship it back to you so you can fix it and send it back?
Or what if you bork the OS by accident? Will their KVM solution allow you to upload an ISO and plug it in over some USB drive emulation?
I do this at my homelab and it’s a really fun thing to do. Collect old laptops and install Linux or Tart for macOS and suddenly you have a fleet of computing power equivalent to paying thousands to AWS. Building reliability and failover is actually a fun engineering problem, use CockroachDB and RustFS. Adding capacity is just about scouting for second hand ewaste.
Will they let me send my laptop if I'm a North Korean remote worker?
What's the difference between this and 1. setting my laptop at home and 2. connect it through Tailscale?
I lose ownership of my laptop, you install whatever software you want on it (with the security risks that it conveys) and in turn "you let me connect to my computer"?
Collocating a bunch of lithium-ion heat pillows all in one place, what could go wrong!
This is CLEARLY a scam.
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...
Very strongly reminds me of Mac Mini Colo - https://www.macminivault.com/mac-mini-colocation/ - it's a clever idea.
Boss: This is not working! Dev: Works on my machine... Boss: Fine, let us deploy your laptop.
This idea kinda makes sense if it's an old Mac mini, since you can't get Mac servers normally. MacBook would be sus due to the battery.
This looks really cool.
I have never colo'd my laptop, but I do work off my Windows laptop from my Mac via Parsec (remote viewing software for gaming) and by flipping system settings so my Windows machine never turns off when connected to the power bank and lid is closed. There are obviously hiccups (if internet goes out, if Windows decides to restart from an update, etc.), but it mostly just works and I think I've only had 2 instances in the past 3 months where it's gone offline. I use Tailscale on top to provide a universal mouse server for my 3d mouse, and I'm able to magically CAD from my Mac.
Highly recommend if you need to use one OS/machine for some specific software (especially if it's beefy/heavy) but prefer using another as your daily driver.
> Your laptop should be fully functional with a working power supply and either an ethernet port or USB port for connectivity. Age isn't a factor. 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.
So they're going to open the laptop up and make hardware modifications to random laptops sent in? May as well have a VPS at that point.
A far better business offering would have been to offer pre-selected physical devices where such things are well known.
Old laptops are also notorious[1] for being fire bombs with bad batteries.
If I was a hetzner customer I'd be pissed if my server burned because someone's 2 minute battery life 10 year old school pc was hosted in the neighbouring rack.
Doesn't seem like a great business idea.
[1]: anecdotally, seems everyone has a laptop lying around with a cursed battery
Instead of critiquing this immediately, let's consider that this gives a second life to hardware that would otherwise be thrown away.
Finding laptops that can support multiple hard drives is becoming more challenging every year. The 15"-17" workstation class Dell Precision, Lenovo P*, HP Zbook, and Framework 16 laptops are well suited to this purpose. Some of them even came with Xeon CPUs and ECC RAM support.
Let’s start a company that does this with old phones. If they’re recent waterproof models you could invert them in cold water and rack them pretty densely while managing heat easily. An ice water Beowulf cluster of iPhone 15s would be a lot of compute in one Yeti cooler.
Any recommendations on inexpensive colo for personal projects/servers? A few years ago ran across a few links for places to host a box and I didn't save them, and have regretted it.
ISTR one was basically just industrial office space that was running a lower-tier colo, and another was some guys in a metro area that got a rack in a data center and were spreading the cost around with other like-minded folks. At my work I have machines in an Iron Mountain facility, but for personal projects I don't need anything like that, but I'd like something that's more capable than AWS that I'm paying $80/mo for a couple VMs.
I am surprised a serious facility would be happy having 100 old LiPo batteries in a rack. That is a (nasty) fire waiting to happen IMO. These are old batteries that may even have minor physical damage from being dropped and will be in maybe a ~25-30c environment.
Does anybody know if they also accept mac minis? Or is the keyboard/display a fundamental requirement to their offering?
lots of proxmox clusters in basements run on old laptops. my pile of t480s beats any cloud vm (except when my ISP goes down).
If I am going to pay a colo I am going to get a proper server.
Or run the laptop at home and tunnel
Also sounds like a recipe for fire.
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.
I think i like the idea. But why specifically laptops, why won't they accept small computers like thinkcentres for example ?
The core density is really low. You can run a 96 core Epyc from the previous generation at 700 W and that’s a lot of compute. It makes sense for a home server (and I have an old Mac playing that role at home) but otherwise I don’t think it makes sense unless you’re taking off the display and racking them super tight.
Even then, you’re probably better off with Cloudflare tunnel and using it as a home server.
I presently use an extra laptop to compute and run for batch jobs. Easy, fast.
> “But it works on my machine…” Then we’ll ship your machine
Is finally possible!
I don't want to crap on peoples ideas. Really, I don't.
But getting some closet case computer with unknown hardware and turning it into a server, at scale, is an impossible scheme.
The only way to make it work would be to buy hundreds of laptops at once and refurb, new storage, and standardize with custom power delivery. Because who wants hundreds of laptop PSU's plugged into power strips. And those do in fact die.
And then there's the horror of manually removing wifi hardware and batteries. Battery disposal is an issue. And having worked on hundreds of laptops, some of them are major pains in the neck to get to the battery. Consumer HP's come to mind. The bottom cover can be difficult to remove without breaking any of the clips.
Point of Reference: 27 years in web hosting
Say what you want about an old laptop, they sure are a lot faster than a $150/mo azure VM. And to be clear, I mean a _LOT_ faster.
I've been using Hetzner and OVH, i used to use GCP and AWS, my bills are now 1/10th of what they were
if you do not use their platform specific features, it's better to run on bare metal with redundancy.
A friend of mine sent it to me and it seems like an interesting option now that hardware pricing has gone insane?
I’m curious if they remove the displays. Not every laptop works with the display closed and it might cause heat issues that throttle the CPU or reduce the life of the machine to run it like that long-term.
There is one scenario it would be good for. People running stock trading programs often need a better network and always on environment than they can get at home
A colo laptop seems a bit daft, vs a colo 2nd hand micro desktop?
If you ship an old laptop with an old HDD, decent chance it will die in shipping.
Yeah but it overheats and also shuts down to save energy
Maybe I'm in the minority... but this seems like an extremely compelling offering for certain use-cases. Not for enterprises, but for individuals and small businesses.
My off-site backup is a thinkpad x230 with a 1 TB HDD. It's currently at my friends house, and I access it with tailscale. 7 eur/month to colocate this in a datacenter with stable (and fast) Internet + power seems like a pretty good deal.
I can understand some of the concerns with user-provided hardware. Maybe a better model, would be for CoLaptop to offer hardware themselves. This would allow them to standardize on a few models, which opens up many possible improvements such as central DC power, power efficient BIOS settings, enclosures with cooling ducts, etc. They can still follow the "old laptop as a server" model by buying off-lease laptops from the corporate world.