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Comments (92)

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  corvad
  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 All rights reserved.Website copyright is out of date by two years...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.comAlso 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.
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  pinkmuffinere
  > 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 hostingThis 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
• donohoe
  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.
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  perrygeo
  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.
• arjie
  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.
• rcakebread
  > We're based in Amsterdam and aim to work with HetznerI 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.
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  yabones
  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 cardNot 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.
• joecool1029
  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.
• linsomniac
  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.
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  reincoder
  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.
• faangguyindia
  I've been using Hetzner and OVH, i used to use GCP and AWS, my bills are now 1/10th of what they wereif you do not use their platform specific features, it's better to run on bare metal with redundancy.
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  ctippett
  Collocating a bunch of lithium-ion heat pillows all in one place, what could go wrong!
• JSR_FDED
  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
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  danesparza
  Does anybody know if they also accept mac minis? Or is the keyboard/display a fundamental requirement to their offering?
• tracker1
  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.
• optimus_banana
  lots of proxmox clusters in basements run on old laptops. my pile of t480s beats any cloud vm (except when my ISP goes down).
• cat-turner
  I presently use an extra laptop to compute and run for batch jobs. Easy, fast.
• dabinat
  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.
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  Nyr
  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...
• geocrasher
  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
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  sixothree
  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.
• argentum47
  A friend of mine sent it to me and it seems like an interesting option now that hardware pricing has gone insane?
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  lizardking
  This is the most vibe-coded looking website possible
• ltbarcly3
  Yea this is a stupid idea. Old laptops don't have good performance per watt compared to new servers once you factor in that they are many many times slower.
• iJohnDoe
  This is never a good idea.A ton of old batteries in one place. The batteries themselves are probably not a concern, but if something happens to the facility, then you have a ton of problems.Security of the facility is a concern if someone can get in and walk out with an armful of laptops.Laptops don’t scale from a stacking stand point. Sure, close the lids and line them up. Then you’ll have a lot of failures. Older laptops are intended to cool through the keyboard and top vents by the screen.
• spiritplumber
  that's how my university did a linux cluster for exercises
• schlecht_
  This seems fishy...
• cactusplant7374
  7 euro a month and unlimited bandwidth? Seems unlikely.
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  burnt-resistor
  Hmm, there's might something to this:+ The usual limiting factor in data centers is power, so laptops could be more optimized for greater cycle efficiency per power than comparable old servers.+ Laptops are generally compact and so achieve greater rack densities than individual co-lo servers. I'm thinking about 34 or 51 laptops could be stored in 9 or 10U either 2 or 3 rows deep by 17 wide.+ Shipping a laptop to a co-lo data center is cheaper than a 1U server.~ Reusing electronics saves e-waste and reduces unnecessary consumption, either old servers or old laptops.- Laptops lack ECC RAM.- Laptops typically don't use nearly as fast CPUs or RAM as contemporaneous servers.- Laptops are limited in their storage options.- Laptops lack remote, lights-out management of real servers.- Repairing old failed laptop components is more difficult than old servers.~ Old laptops tend not to have usable batteries, so there's unlikely to be much an inherently distributed battery backup capability.- Old laptop batteries of various origins could be a li-ion NMC fire hazard at scale.~ Reusing old stuff at any sort of scale would prefer standardization, and it's sometimes difficult to amass many of the same discontinued model.Conclusion: Do it if it works for you. It's kinda cool.
• anon
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  malux85
  Eeek, I can't imagine what this is like if it scales. What happens to the fire risk when theres 20,000 laptops with aging batteries all sitting together? I hope they take the batteries out, however many laptops use batteries to smooth out power fluctuations.Laptops aren't designed to be servers - peg your laptop CPU and GPU at 100% and see how long it lasts, I've done this before and the answer is about "2 months", yep sure, this effort isn't targeting that workload, but how many bad apples does it take to start a fire? In their page they say "kubernetes server - no problem" kubernetes DOES keep the CPUs busy, not pegged, but busy enough so that they wont step down their frequency.I admire the effort to reuse old tech, but boy oh boy would I not want to be a sysadmin here!
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  JVIDEL
  Wait, whats the point of this if I can have my old laptop running in my garage?
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  opengrass
  pages.dev, you can't be serious.
• anon
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• fnord77
  sounds like a battery fire waiting to happen
• tiku
  Yeah for dev purposes perhaps. Production would be another story.
• calvinmorrison
  uh yeah i mean we 'colo' at work because its cheaper than buying a windows server with multiple RDP licenses. We have some legacy stuff that must be run on site.... so we buy $200 laptops and people can remote in for years.
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  shikaan
  Is this how we bring "works on my machine" in production? /s