The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer

When we started Discourse in 2013, our server requirements were high:

1GB RAM
modern, fast dual core CPU
speedy solid state drive with 20G+

I'm not talking about a cheapo shared cpanel server, either, I mean a dedicated virtual private server with those specifications.

We were OK with that, because we were building in Ruby for the next decade of the Internet. I predicted early on that the cost of renting a VPS with those specs would drop to $5 per month, and courtesy of Digital Ocean that indeed happened in January 2018.

The cloud got cheaper, and faster. Not really a surprise, since the price of hardware trends to zero over time. But it's still the cloud, and that means it isn't exactly cheap, because it is, after all, someone else's computer that you pay for the privilege of renting.

But wait … what if you could put your own computer "in the cloud"?

Wouldn't that be the best of both worlds? Reliable connectivity, plus a nice low monthly price for extremely fast hardware? If this sounds crazy, it shouldn't – Mac users have been doing this for years now.

I suppose it's understandable that Mac users would be on the cutting edge here since Apple barely makes server hardware, whereas the PC world has always been the literal de-facto standard for server hardware.

Given the prevalence and maturity of cloud providers, it's even a little controversial these days to colocate actual servers, but we've also experimented with colocating mini-pcs in various hosting roles. I'm still curious why there isn't more of a cottage industry for colocating mini PCs. Because … I think there should be.

I originally wrote about the scooter computers we added to our Discourse infrastructure in 2016, plus my own colocation experiment that ran concurrently. Over the last three years of both experiments, I've concluded that these little boxes are plenty reliable, with one role specific caveat that I'll explain in the comments. I remain an unabashed fan of mini-PC colocation. I like it so much I put together a new 2019 iteration:

2017 — $6702019 — $820
i7-7500u
2.7-3.5 Ghz, 2c / 4ti7-8750h
2.2-4.1 Ghz, 6c / 12t
16GB DDR3 RAM32GB DDR4 RAM
500GB SATA SSD500GB NVMe SSD

This year's iteration of the scooter computer offers 3× the cores, 2× the memory, and 3× faster drive. It is, as the kids say … an absolute unit.