This is corny, but thanks for being awesome! It feels so nice to see this community grow out of a shared vision of what the internet should be.
Standing up my little instance has been a blast! I’m not quite done with it, but your combined enthusiasm gives me hope for the future of the internet. 😊
People used to make their own sites and dedicated forum boards where the norm. With the mess of old hardware floating about, the overall lowering of bandwidth costs, more options being made available and simpler to deploy, and storage in the TBs coming down on price the population is bound to make things personal again one way or another. Being just another profile on some big platform doesn’t have the ‘me’ mark to it that putting your own together does. Have fun with it, break things and make them better, always a new idea to be had.
Unfortunately no old cloud servers or switches on ebay. As such availability of used hardware is more limited in future.
you dont even need big old iron. I run all my containers etc on old business sff pcs and storage on synology. works great
I’m weird, so I have 10G/40G networking and half a rack that would burn 10 kW when all fired up. My major cost issue is power, which is currently 0.7 EUR/kWh though capped at 0.4 EUR/kWh for a while. I could use some more modern hardware but it’s no longer bountiful and cheap.
Just need to find the right sites. A couple places I’ve gone that seem to pick up a bunch of corporate PLM gear and refurb it are here:
I know about Servermonkey, and the prices there aren’t nice at all. I’m rather sticking with old servers with roughly the same specs, but perhaps twice the wattage and noise, which only run occasionally. The 24/7 stuff is already on a low-power footprint, though I don’t have a successor for that little Supermicro when it bites the dust. I’d rather pay way less than 1 kEUR for it.
