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LowEnd Colocation needs for providers // hobbyists? (Helsinki, Finland)
PulsedMedia
Member, Patron Provider
We are considering a larger DC project than just our own needs with another business here in Helsinki. Phase 1 would have something like 40 racks (or however we happen to still have in warehouse remaining), but full build closer to 100 racks on room 1, and room2 is the same size, so total of 200 racks eventually.
We might take in a few colocation customers even abroad selectively.
We can deliver up to 3 feeds (individual transformers) + UPS + Diesel Gens, but i bet most lowend providers and hobbyists wouldn't want "such extravagant, unnecessarily expensive things" 
So what would be your "dream colocation setup" as a LowEnd provider or hobbyist?
Let's try to keep it sensible tho, afterall we do still need to make profit to offer anything. Right now just shooting ideas, nothing firm, just discussion 
For Joe Average Business Colocation we are considering about ~3-400€ per rack with 3x16A 230V, ~4-600€ per rack with 3x32A, +XX€ a month if redundant feed (UPS+Gen) and racks with 24/7 private access (non-escorted) will be +XX€/Mo depending on the extra security costs.
On the flipside, we can offer highly competitive IP Transit, CWDM/DWDM, Backhaul, Darkfiber etc. services so if you need a lot of BW this will be very competitive vs. Hetzner Tuusula. We would have very short distance to Telia HDC, and therefore access to Ficix, Netnod, DataIX there.
Comments
For hobbyists, you may want to offer 1U/2U location as well!
1U/2U with 1 Gbps shared unlimited or 10Gbps shared metered. My ideal monthly range would be 40€ or under with power included or under 40€ (even if its just 39,99€) but power billed seperately.
Anything over 50€ for 1U would be too much. I could probly still take power bills on top of that.
Full rack? Hell no, would rather run from basement at that scale if its still hobbyist.
1U 40€ + power ... That's actually interesting, full rack would make 1600€ a month + few % on the power ... a lot of manpower required to setup, so setup fee required. tons of measuring HW on that single rack tho, but the money just might be there to make it viable.
Something worth considering. But needs clear definition of costs etc. (remote hands, shipping back the HW, billing term should be pushed to 3-6months i think with setup fees etc.)
Reasonable prices on IP ranges as well. I am looking for 1U in the US and I feel like a lower price per U results in a higher IP range price.
what pricing are you seeing?
Absolutely ideal situation:
Colocation: 1U 39.99€ (incl. VAT) Billing cycle: Monthly, per 3 months, per 6 months, per 12 months.
Power: Based on actual usage and billed per KWh/month, or some free default allocation, or some power plans to choose from, but any over-usage is billed separately.
Setup fees: Free or dynamic depending on how busy the provider is currently.
Network: 1Gbps Shared unlimited FUP, 1Gbps Dedicated Metered, 10Gbps Shared unlimited FUP, 10Gbps Shared metered.
Extra IPs: 2€/m (incl. VAT) per IP and free setup up to some point (3-5 IPs) and after that Subnets with setup fees and monthly fees for those that need more.
btw, is it mediam dc in Hiomotie? or your own facility
There are very little Finnish colocations out there, and even less under 80€/m ones, and none of the budget tier hobbyist ones. Creanova and Hetzner are only ones that even list prices.
Our own.
Problem doing 1U hobbyist grade colocation is the human labor required, it's very low fee, but quite a bit of effort which requires very expensive personnel spending time on it. Further, the more options there are, the more work it requires to handle.
There is no time ever when "all the work is done", so busy always.
At least there is some public prices, and Hetzner is by far the cheapest, by a huge margin.
When we started, public pricing wasn't really available. Also typically a rack is very expensive.
Can't you solve this by asking arm and leg for remote hands and simply offer no support if its anything not related to networking directly.
Simply make a requirements sheet for the colo customers that even a retard can follow and understand before sending the gear over, so you simply have to mount it with included rails and plug in the ethernet cable, and the customer can control rest himself via his built in ILO/iDRAC which should be pre-installed.
After the stuff is mounted up, marked and running, I can hardly think of anything that requires support from the colo provider.
Limit options based on what's fastest to provide/install/configure once and easiest to manage in autopilot. I would imagine that colocation customers would not be as needy as the VPS customers on this site.
If you want idiot proof guidelines, ask @Neoon as hes quite good compiling them.
There are some people who expect they are the exception to every single rule you set out. You have to always think of this type of people.
Almost every single colocation customer so far has expected us to supply network & power cables for example, and that rackmount power bars are free and the 1RU magically became free because it was power bar, or mounting gateway stuff on side of the rack etc.
But i guess, setting forth some baselines, asking for photos prior to shipping // coming to install, every single thing is nickel & dimed, like initial setup you have only 30minutes to complete your work or we start charging remote hand fees. Only specific time windows for weekly maintenance visit.
Further provide PiKVMs as well for a fee, say 15€ setup and 5€ per month (min. 1month)
ilo/idrac: Hmm, that needs separate network, wireguard/openvpn gateways, vlans etc. all configured
Hard to see a business case for 1U super cheap colo, the volume probably is not there. Only a lot of work to handle it, and we are short staffed always as usual.
With annual upfront billing, power max 200W (145kWh/Mo) built-in and for 60-80€ a month maybe, and additional services etc. it might work out tho.
60-80€ per 1RU would bring in 24-3200€ per rack per month. Power overages charged at like 5c/kWh margin + 10€ billing surcharge etc. it might work out.
Then again, it's a rare hobbyist who can justify upfront 1000€ for 1 year of fees.
Tho on the other side, if they also buy our used about to be binned HW for the colo, then it makes actually lots of sense and would open up broader market since no need to fuss about shipping anything -- while bringing us some return on about to be binned HW, or even some newer stuff we have laying around. But at that point it makes sense to open up the whole Supermicro, ASRockRack and Gigabyte catalog you could buy through us, and that gets to all kinds of different market area.
It's the backend processes which are critical to get low rates working. Any hiccup or delay, and you are SOL.
One case i can see which is problematic -> Drive swaps, communicating that and having to charge like 60€ to complete it, while customer drive might be only worth 50€.
Personally, I would be very interested in buying HW and colo-ing it directly from you. Though the price of the HW needs to be fair and not too old (at most Skylake/v4+ era stuff) and I should be able to upgrade the HW by sending you RAM, disks, CPUs (of course for a remote hand fee).
Was looking at a /28, it went from $8/m on a more $ provider to $25/m with a cheaper one.
buy raspberry pi's and put them in the racks for a ton of dedi space / space for sff pc's
my dream price is around 10 smackaroons
Hmm, that would quickly go to standard ASRockRack / Gigabyte / Supermicro catalog we could supply with minimal processing margin, like 5% or so on top of our supplier pricing. BUT, that would be so many quote requests etc. as most likely 9/10 requests will not lead to sale, and our local distributor might get annoyed when we constantly ask quotes
(yea no public pricing on that stuff!)
Also we could handle sea freight for anything from say eBay too, see a good deal there? Send us the link.
That age nodes would still be in production for us normally.
Maintaining list of available hardware as well a bit of work.
Freight from Finland to ship back to customer is also a bit of a mess and expensive. So there needs to be fees too. Sending a standard 1RU server from Finland to say the UK, could be quickly at around 250€ :O
probably because of the handling, takes a moment to make the switch rules, document them etc.
Then again, this probably should be done as privately routing /32 at a time, this is possible, and per colo customer VLANs from get-go, fully routed. Takes a bit of effort to do that initially, and automation ... well you probably have to either make SDN stuff, or some hacky thing which SSH into the switch to automate that stuff.
Light bulb moment
Ooh! What if customer dedis are setup into standard baremetal automation we would setup internally, that dedi is just marked to the customer but then all reboots etc. could be done from panel.
Limits server models, but could be done! That would limit the amount of management wildly.
We are working on that right now, that would make a lot of sense to do it like that actually.
...
Now that i think about procedures like that, this could actually be very synergestic with limited amount of work, if stuff is standardized that it has to work within our baremetal automation it would add features, streamline management.
Thinking about automation and streamlining like that, it would cause some limits:
Why no physical access?
so automation cannot be messed up, our staff knows what is what, and how it's made, no jumping rack to rack doing private cross connect, no stealing power etc.!
all of which has been major issues with other colocation offers locally when customer has physical access, i know one which went bankrupt largely because of people stealing power (they put in their own extension cords and took power from non-measured outlets, or bypassed the per rack UPS which had monitoring built-in). Or one place single phase got overloaded and electrical cabinet burned! Fire and datacenters don't mix.
Security of other customers is paramount.
If we rack the servers ourselves, do the wiring ourselves etc. then everything is systematically done, and connected like they should be.
Automation setup
It would take us a bit of extra effort setting the backend manually tagging a node to certain customer, documentation etc. so that it is never accidentally taken into standard provisioning pool. But in the long term this will save hours per node, no need to go manually reboot stuff, manually install OS etc.
Use only expensive PDUs with power control & monitoring built-in.
If the system we are considering is employed it would add following stuff (eventually):
* BW Monitoring
* IP Handling
* Remote reinstalls (at least for standard disk configs!)
* iDRAC/KVM etc. access
* Monitoring & auto-reboots
* API Access and WHMCS module, so this very same thing would work for setting up your own business around colocated dedis with us if you want to sell them forwards etc.
Initial options
We would need to setup at least 4x 42RU racks initially:
* No Power Backup, 1Gbps Shared Unmetered, Rack uplink 20Gbps
* No Power Backup, 10Gbps Shared Unmetered, Rack Uplink 40-80Gbps (To make it cost effective, let there be congestion otherwise price skyrockets)
* No Power Backup, 1Gbps Unlimited Dedicated (40Gbps uplink is in reality sufficient for this, some will have 2U nodes)
* No Power Backup, 10Gbps Unlimited Dedicated (400Gbps uplinks yikes! 200Gbps would prob be sufficient, extremely difficult to keep 10Gbps at 100% utilization in normal production)
Then later add power backup options.
This actually could work streamlined like that.
Then just very stern warning, don't adhere to the rules you start immediately racking up 120€/hr remote hands fees when we have to fiddle with your stuff, and hardware will not be shipped back unless all fees have been paid up.
Do some documentation on what works, how it has to be setup, what info we need.
Some setup fee to cover the silly things people always forget (or are wrong for the setup) -> Cabling, Screws, Bolts etc.
Document how HDD replacements has to be handled (identifying the correct drive!)
Despite all of that there will be, guaranteed, some people who expect us to work for free, and be an exception to the rule, need to be very precise on terms of service + upfront communicating that stuff just costs, especially if humans are involved. There will be silly questions like "how do i setup XYZ on my colocated server?" or people demanding stuff like "private vpn box so i can use idrac directly and route through it and i demand it is free and you spend hours setting it up for me" or access to the backend IPMI network (big no no!)
Some people will want us to store spares too, so standard bin sizes and storage costs for those as an option (not wasting rackspace for spares).
In Future it might be interesting to Expand in other Locations. Just wondering;
What would you Charge for 5-10 Racks (preferably in a row), 2x32amp each. Kwh Billing. 10Gbit Unmetered to one of this Rack (Upgradeable, LACP) with Possiblities to interconnect The other racks To The Main Rack with uplinks. And what is The Power pricing in Finnland?
2x 32AMP 230V, or 3x32A 230V?
Presuming 3x32A, easier to deliver
Please note these are guesstimates for new place:
10 racks we'll sweeten the deal by probably 10-20%
Now that's super great! Especially for RAM, SSD, CPU where you can find pretty good deals there!
I would be interested in this too. Maybe gather a bulk order.
A little OT maybe, but are all of the extremely cheap kind of modern EPYC CPU's on Ebay from China by very reputable sellers legit?
Also, do it in Sweden instead and I'll rent some space
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Some. Watch out for Dell locked CPUs. I believe we bought a couple of Zen1 32c CPUs straight from china some years back.
Not possible, we are in Finland
Takes very specific local area knowledge to do this stuff on budget.
But hey, it's easy enough to ship from Sweden or just buy some of our old gear for your colo, and few hours of remote hands. Or you can order a new or refurb supermicro from Damicon Kraa (local Supermicro / Gigabyte / AsRock Rack distributor) and just let them know we will pick it up for you. That pick up will be free, it's next to our current main DC.
We have to set minimum order Qty // Fee per order, since it's work, all the customs etc. infact even accounting is a few euros per order! :O
Most often whatever you are looking for we already have in stock @ ebay competitive rates or even below
Writing this on a 2nd gen EPYC and 1st gen motherboard from Ebay. The seller accept my offer which made this set better value than Ali's only first gen kit. They works just fine, except for some weird stability issue on one PCIE x16 slot.
I'll upgrade to 2nd gen motherboard in a year or so.
What I would love to see as someone who never coloed, but has a lot of dedis rented:
Let's piece meal this, on how i would envision this would function:
Different racks for HA
Due to low volume most likely, and process difficulties this might be hard to guarantee, but if there is enough volume i'm quite certain a level of distributing on different racks could be done.
10Gbps unmetered private networking between machines
This is a cross connect between your device(s), you could choose to colocate a switch. We would probably charge a few € per month within rack cross connects, and between racks 25€/Mo (same as typical cross connect)
5-10Gbps metered (200-300TB) public networking for fairly good price
Not doable. Get 10G Unmetered Shared per node, or buy flat 10G to your private switch (and pay less for colo, the 1G Unmetered Shared rate)
Additional backup storage option for OS (Hetzner includes 100GB storage box for free for dedis)
Just choose how much you need: https://pulsedmedia.com/storage-boxes.php
option to add rules to HW firewall
Same as your private switch, colocate a HW firewall and connect via that
Let's assume you have 8x 2U nodes on 2 racks, each with 1RU private switch and 1RU HW Firewall device.
This is a total of 8x 2RU colocations.
1x Cross Connect between racks, and 5x cross connects per rack (4 to each node, 1 to HW firewall) within rack for total of 10x cross connects.
What pricing i ballparked earlier this would then be:
8x70€ for nodes
4x40€ for switches / HW Firewalls
10x 5€ in rack XCon
1x 25€ rack to rack XCon
Total: 795€ per month
Includes 1G Unmetered drop per node, add the 10G Flat Rate drop to one of your private switches/HW Firewalls if you want that, presumably 500 to 750€ a month per dedicated 10G.
Total space consumed: 16RU, so still price competitive.
If everything supplied as specified, no extra remote hands required at all (XCon fee essentially contains the setup cost, cabling etc. from our behalf, and the initial setup fee for colo // long term required commitment would cover the initial racking and setup)
To be frank, wanting multiple rack, private switches, hw firewalls etc. starts to be realm of say Ficolo AIR or Telia HDC. Ficolo AIR is something like 1000€+ per rack per month, and HDC is 1500€+ per rack per month ++ setup fees ++ power fees ++ transit ++ remote hands etc.
So this would still be extremely price competitive. But, it has to fit into the streamlined mass production routines, no special requests, no special "free setups". There's no free lunch. Specialty stuff is #1, #2, #3 we want to avoid. One seemingly innocuous request (private dumb switch consuming 20W) might look like it costs us jack shit, but that's not true, it costs us in management overhead.
Real Life example: Customer had their own Mikrotik CoreRouter, i went middle of night to replace it's PSU, had to solder in new connector, find a sutiable power brick from our stock pile of ewaste (got lucky had one!) -- and customer refused to pay a single dime for that. (Tbh, with that jackass it looks like we have to go to court to get what's owed to us). Emergency middle of night, 2 hours driving, 2-3 hours working, multiple calls @ 165€ per hour + 100% middle of night emergency call == ~1 320 to 1 650€.
Couple years later, again same shit, about 3.5hr wasted, but at least middle of day so 866.25€ "only". (driving hours etc. is not billable, but they are still overheads and working time lost. This actually kinda wasted the whole working day, the whole rest of the week had to be rescheduled)
Example #2: Another one wanted to zip tie a ubiquity mini thingy ma jigg into the rack as VPN Gateway for IPMI etc, i said ok, but it's been more than once in the way, and i believe i might've had to go reboot it for him a few times too. 0€ revenue, but hours of time spent @ á 165€ per hour. Probs ~330€
Example #3:, this sounds almost petty, but switch ports cost money too! The really high end switches we use to ensure maximum throughput consumes something like 7.5W per port, @ 22c/kWh that would be 1.21€/Port/Month in power alone, let alone management + investment + maintenance (and if you run out of ports for the rack because you allowed tiny VPN gateways free of charge, add second switch or buy a dedicated switch just for those. In either case, you loose 1RU).
Tho this is not really an issue if we do this, plan is to have 2 switches per rack: 1x super low power just IPMI usage (tho quite "expensive" to buy for dumb switch, not many 48port very low power 1RU switches available on the market, i think those were only 20-25W each, costs ~400€ each), and 1x high end TOR for the actual internet access.
Just because it seems cheap, doesn't mean it's really cheap when you operate as a business. It's insane how the money gets drained on little silly things. It's always fun to buy "just need a few cables" and you notice you just spend 1000-2000€ and still, didn't get enough of some specific length lol.
Few months back i was cursing, i needed some screws for HDDs. Cheap, and ubiquitious riiight? well something like 550€ later doesn't feel very cheap lol.
Its a very good pricing for sure. I would love to hear from you when you have built up your new room and finished your project, should you decide to do it. Or i may reach out to you sometime next year. to expand in Finnland. Been looking for some time for a 2nd location in EU where power is still ""cheap"" to get some additional business and profit. I was looking for Norway and Finnland as well.
About Racks, 5 would be minimum and 10Gbit is just start in this example. Will scale up.
I am as well right now in NL at some purpose built datacenter (warehouse, transformed into DC). But i am more happy with it then the recent "Premium DCs" before i was.
Servers Dual E5's running at 18 degrees in summer. Much better there then the DC i moved away in NL (because power price got 0,60€/kwh - besides paying arround 300€ per GBIT of commitment) - where things run at 25-30 degrees. You see a decreasing power usage of few thousand KWH (at my size of business) when the cooling just works better.
My current NL DC have arround same pricing as you. They added 50 Racks beginning this year and next year 300 Racks where i also want to expand as well in this location. They have a waiting list. I just got in because im not "the small" customer. So just go for it
im sure it sells when you have the client base.
I think its all about the technical side and it just has to work. I dont mind about the Location being a warehouse etc. If you know what i mean
and im sure most people think the same. affordable power and bandwidth, loads of bandwidth - and it just has to work. That Is what you need. And NOT a expensive Equinix or something building, purchased at sky high prices, offering racks at sky high prices.
Interesting!
Yea what we are looking for right now (the prior one was moldy) is from a old "tradecrafts" building, industrial, meant to originally have trades people, and it was some sort of metal fabricators shop originally.
At the end of the day, the servers don't care if they are in glass palace or in a swamp dump, as long as environmentals are right for their continuous operation.
We checked old highend DC, it was like 500kw max per 500m2, but since it was all built to be dual redundant 250kw, and only super expensive cooling, only compressors with air circulation. Everything was double to quadruple redundant, and way more space was dedicated to all the infra than actual DC, and the DC side was built in-side middle of the building making cooling near impossible. No wonder it's not in use anymore, i bet PUE was on the 2.0 level, and double to quadruple infrastructure to handle.
It was so extravagant, that even the offices had raised floor!
DC industry is full of this kind of extravagant money expenditure in chase of 0.001% added uptime. Where in reality, 99.99% of cases, 99.99% of uptime is more than enough. It's hard to mess up big enough to go worse than 99.9% uptime. But everyone seems to be chasing 99.9999+% level or max ~32secs downtime per year.
That NL one was crazy expensive, how can anyone run anything there profitably? oO;
We do target about 30C ambient btw, since this does not make difference for uptime. Tho during winter it's frequently down to 15C. But excellent point, there seems to be difference in objectives. For us we determined allowing going even above 30C during summers was the most cost effective, but i guess we should re-evaluate these kind of decisions every few years, if this holds still true with current servers in use. When that decision was made i think the fans started to really ramp up only after 40C.
Current AC target is set to 28-29C, but the units are not running at full tilt.
That's high IMHO. I start sweating when we get AVG temps up around 80 to 82F if we have a unit with issues. We try to keep our stuff around 70, when our units kick on we get it around 66 to 68 when the blowers are running.
The place is for servers, not for humans.
There is no reason to waste money trying to keep much below ambient, all a waste and 1€ wasted at base level is translated to 2-3€ on end user cost.