Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

https://colaptop.pages.dev/

by argentum47 • 3 months ago

397 247 3 months ago

colaptop.pages.dev

argentum47• 3 months ago

A friend of mine sent it to me and it seems like an interesting option now that hardware pricing has gone insane?

malux85• 3 months ago

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!

skullone• 3 months ago

My old Lenovo t420 has been running 24/7 pegged as a multi-camera DVR since 2011, no issues whatsoever. Of course the battery is removed, but I don't see many decent laptops struggling running under load for prolonged periods.

cucumber3732842• 3 months ago

I worked for a place that did something akin to this in the early 2010s. Someone figured out how to add 32-bit company laptops to the virtualization cluster (likely because they were using one as a stand in for a server that at the time would have been in the works but not yet purchased) and so once that work had been incurred they just kept "retiring" unserviceable company laptops to the cluster. Imagine a standard wire metro-rack crammed in a telecom closet beside a normal server rack. Now imagine that metro rack literally full of Toshiba Satellite Pro's from about 2005-9. The cluster hosted virtual machines for testing.

No fires, no hardware problems. No special cooling other than the mini-split that was in the closet to cool the server rack. They just kept trucking. But modern hardware is much more high strung and I don't doubt you'd have weird failures.

Edit: Back then VMs were how things were done and RAM was seemingly always the bottleneck by a mile, so the cluster did add up to a meaningful amount of extra performance compared to not having it.

opengrass• 3 months ago

pages.dev, you can't be serious.

darrylb42• 3 months ago

Looks like an April 1st article, but there is no date on it.

faangguyindia2• 3 months ago

i just don't understand, why it isn't acceptable to use pages.dev

why we must all spend money on domain to show off our projects?

justsomehnguy5• 3 months ago

all spend money

If your 'project' can't allocate $15 for a domain name then you have a bigger problem with your project. Especially if your project involves taking money from customers.

martheen• 3 months ago

This particular project imply a financial commitment (it's not like you can walk to the data center right now with random assortment of laptops to be setup today without reserving a rack for a month or so), using a free hosting mean they didn't even spend the minimum.

sixothree2• 3 months ago

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.

hsbauauvhabzb3• 3 months ago

That’s saying a lot about azure, not the laptops.

kingstnap• 3 months ago

I looked it up for specifics.

Right now the closest I can see is that $121/mo gets you 4 Xeon Platinum 8370C cores and 16GiB of RAM [0] (storage not included!).

Somebody Geekbenched that config here [1] 1274 single core 4256 multi core.

Thats kinda terrible ngl. A mini pc with last gen mobile parts like Ryzen 5 7640HS gets 2610 single and 10768 multi core [2].

[0] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-ma...

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/17547159

[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/17541586

sixothree2• 3 months ago

I feel like Azure and AWS are both getting worse. I logged into a VM I haven't used in some time and was immediately shocked at just how slowly it rendered even the most basic UI elements.

notpushkin• 3 months ago

All the big 3 cloud providers suck if you use them purely as VPS. I’ve tried AWS Lightsail (basically, slightly cheaper EC2) and it’s so much slower than what I’d expect from a similar spec VM from a normal hosting provider.

Hetzner, DigitalOcean, OVH, Vultr are some of the better-known ones. Personally, I’m very happy with SSD Nodes. Paying $90/yr for a 4 vCPU¹ / 16 GB / 320 GB SSD, had some downtime exactly once in two years (they’ve had to switch their IPv4 space in Tokyo). Affiliate link: https://ale.sh/r/ssdnodes

[1]: Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 (4) @ 2.199GHz – not great, I know, but to reiterate: that’s for $90 a year.

donohoe• 3 months ago

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.

wkjagt• 3 months ago

Maybe it's someone's old project idea that they never got around to finishing, and OP randomly found it and posted it here. Maybe it was never meant to be shared.

schlecht_• 3 months ago

This seems fishy...

optimus_banana• 3 months ago

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• 3 months ago

I presently use an extra laptop to compute and run for batch jobs. Easy, fast.

tiku• 3 months ago

Yeah for dev purposes perhaps. Production would be another story.

pinkmuffinere• 3 months ago

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

foobarian• 3 months ago

Not sure how Hetzner works, but do they have IDRAC type access to their servers and/or remote hands available to fix stuff? Guess you'd be on the hook for that sort of thing here, making the Hetzner price more appealing if they do include that kind of functionality.

folmar• 3 months ago

For physical machines of course yes.

The linked one is VPS, so all trouble fixing is easier.

QuantumNomad_3• 3 months ago

I bet it's also less reliable than Hetzner's servers, and is likely to suddenly die some day

I’m a happy Hetzner customer but I have had servers that I rented from them die a couple of times.

I rent physical servers from them that have been previously rented to other customers. At some point hard drives fail.

However, I have solid backup setup in place (ZFS send and recv to other physical hosts in different physical locations) with that in mind, so I haven’t lost data with Hetzner. But if I naively did not have any backup then data would have gotten lost a couple of times.

KomoD• 3 months ago

Well, yeah, but that's not really a Hetzner thing. That's just computers in general.

Just monitor them so you can act proactively.

wolrah• 3 months ago

I rent physical servers from them that have been previously rented to other customers. At some point hard drives fail.

The comparison in this case is to Hetzner's VPS offerings, which are probably less powerful than the average "old laptop" but have a significant advantage in terms of hardware reliability. It's still possible for the host running the VPS to have problems which result in a crash or the VM equivalent of a hard power off but the VM hosts and their underlying storage should be redundant such that the virtual hardware never fails.

That's not to say rebooting from a crash-consistent state will always work, you should always keep backups even with a high-quality VPS host, but the odds of recovering cleanly from a hardware problem are orders of magnitude better than an old laptop. For the sort of hobby project or personal tinker box that would be reasonable to host on a random laptop shoved in a rack you probably wouldn't even notice the downtime until you saw the event notification email your provider sends you.

c0balt• 3 months ago

Edit: Maybe this is what github is doing :P

Announcing the new "mobile" tier on azure.

lizardking• 3 months ago

This is the most vibe-coded looking website possible

aerhardt• 3 months ago

It’s as if Claude Code and Bootstrap 3 had had an illegitimate child.

danesparza2• 3 months ago

Does anybody know if they also accept mac minis? Or is the keyboard/display a fundamental requirement to their offering?

whalesalad• 3 months ago

tons of places do mac mini colo, https://www.macminivault.com/mac-mini-colocation/

bombcar2• 3 months ago

Marco tells us that if you have 48 Mac minis, buy them yourself and rent a rack.

corvad• 3 months ago

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.

JVIDEL2• 3 months ago

The premise was kinda dumb, wouldn't be surprised if its just a scam.

tosti• 3 months ago

More likely a prank.

kube-system16• 3 months ago

The title says PoC, so I presume it's a PoC.

PaulHoule• 3 months ago

So many people want to believe in this sort of thing for various reasons that I get fatigued at the very thought of trying to explain to people who believe in it earnestly that it is not a good idea. (e.g. commercial hosting services are really competitive; for a long time the cost of computing has been going down over time though I don't know if that is reversing because we've hit the end of the real Moore's law [1] or if it is a temporary blip)

[1] the motor behind it is cost reduction, once that stops it stops because we can't afford it anymore!

Waterluvian• 3 months ago

What if it’s a compute Ponzi scheme?

0xbadcafebee• 3 months ago

1) You don't have to keep copyrights up to date (and in fact you don't have to put them at all), 2) Every single startup i've seen on HN is sketchy af. Racking laptops in a cage at a Hetzner DC is probably the least sketchy product i've seen here.

And honestly, not a terrible idea, I have old laptops that would work as a VPS. $7/month for somebody to host a public server for me, and not on my crappy residential isp? All I have to lose is an old laptop I haven't touched in 5 years? Sign me up

(they do need a real domain before i'll give them money tho, lol)

nrdvana• 3 months ago

Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet, and not worry about hardware failing. It's true that a laptop probably has more resources than the smallest VMs, but no remote management interface and can't scale if you suddenly had a surge of traffic.

whilenot-dev• 3 months ago

Website copyright is out of date by two years...

Can you explain how a copyright can be "out of date by two years"?

I always thought the copyright notice should reflect the year of creation, and that it's actually bad (from a legal POV) to always show the current year through scripting.

timc3• 3 months ago

You are correct. (Had it verified years ago in Europe and the US).

ethanc8• 3 months ago

The problem is that the website says they are still working out the logistics details. If the company has been around for 2 years they should have figured that out and updated the page by now.

kube-system16• 3 months ago

> © 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

That's exactly what it should be then. A copyright notice lists the year of publication. Not the current year.

A proper copyright notice consists of three elements: a © symbol, the year of publication, and the copyright owner’s name.

https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/what-is-copyright-notice/

gzread2• 3 months ago

Yep. If you write

``` © <?=$currentYear?> Your Name ```

As many sites do, it may actually invalidate your copyright. You have to put all of the years when you made copyrightable edits to the page. A range like 2010-2025 is only allowed if every single year in that range is included.

justsomehnguy5• 3 months ago

Website copyright is out of date by two years

It's fixed now.

And someone bought the .com domain: https://crt.sh/?id=25447880244

VTimofeenko• 3 months ago

Give us your laptop

There's no way to read this without hearing Scottish accent. It's like a sleeper agent activation phrase.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKfAjlW6E30

j45• 3 months ago

It could be a pre-sales site to estimate demand.

Colocating itself, though isn't new at all. Lots of different ways to host, including servers, mac minis, laptops are conceivable too because they share the same kinds of parts that mac minis might have.

yonatan80703• 3 months ago

It looks like since you posted your comment, the pages.dev link redirects to colaptop.com, and the copyright notice has been updated to 2026.

InsideOutSanta• 3 months ago

Also, isn't this just a huge fire hazard of they actually do what they claim? Or will they remove the batteries from these old, continually plugged in, poorly cooled laptops?

SadTrombone• 3 months ago

This is addressed on their site.

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.

torginus4• 3 months ago

I mean the idea has merit in of itself, but I think this should be more of an on-prem thing, just repurposing old laptops junked by IT as servers.

exiguus• 3 months ago

In 2026 it should be: Give us your smartphone and we promise ...

JVIDEL2• 3 months ago

Wait, whats the point of this if I can have my old laptop running in my garage?

gowld2• 3 months ago

They can't profit from your garage.

arm32• 3 months ago

In theory—the data center they'd put your laptop in has a much faster, and more reliable, internet connection than your garage.

wltr3• 3 months ago

That surely depends on a country. Data centre is still better in theory. But in practice, I have very little imagination to use a gigabit connection all to myself.

kube-system16• 3 months ago

Colocation has reliable power, reliable environmental conditions, and internet connections that are better suited for running servers.

burnt-resistor2• 3 months ago

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.

saltcured• 3 months ago

I think it's one of those ideas that only works with nostalgia or hoarding impulses to support it.

I think normal virtualization approaches are far more power efficient, at a fleet level, than any kind of cluster of laptop scenarios. You can pile in the cores and amortize the costs of memory controllers etc. over a large set of guests.

It is a funny way to get features of both worlds. One reason to want colo (rather than VMs) is for predictability, but laptops still give you the funny throughput problems, because of thermal throttling instead of competing guests.

0x457• 3 months ago

Aside from this probably being a scam or dead project, but they do say they either remove or disable batteries. Either way battery can be removed.

- Repairing old failed laptop components is more difficult than old servers.

I think "run it until it's dead" kind of thing.

burnt-resistor2• 3 months ago

Sure that can work for individuals and small groups with physical separate high availability. It maybe faster and simpler to find another replacement, but I'm thinking about it from a permaculture perspective of sometimes old parts inventory exist somewhere for cheap or it's only a small broken component that could be fixed to avoid unnecessary e-waste contributions and spending more money on consumption to fix a problem.

Typical enterprise server lifecycle is 4-6 years purposefully throws away uncertain remaining potential value because budgets needs to be spent, risk aversion to repairing what's considered "outdated", and possibly acquiring faster and more energy-efficiency equipment. I would guess it's about the same lifecycle length for enterprise and personal laptops too.

ctippett• 3 months ago

Collocating a bunch of lithium-ion heat pillows all in one place, what could go wrong!

prmoustache2• 3 months ago

Most laptops work perfectly fine with the battery removed and for those who cannot replacing it with a large capacitor is usually a solution.

subarctic2• 3 months ago

Using a capacitor sounds interesting but also pretty tricky, have you done that yourself?

traderj0e2• 3 months ago

I thought a lot of laptops don't work without the battery, especially the increasingly common unibody types.

calvinmorrison• 3 months ago

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.

cactusplant7374• 3 months ago

7 euro a month and unlimited bandwidth? Seems unlikely.

tracker1• 3 months ago

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.

yabones• 3 months ago

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.

hsbauauvhabzb3• 3 months ago

It’s not about your battery, it’s the battery in all the other laptops that would have me concerned. Plenty of fire risk.

justinclift2• 3 months ago

Not just the batteries. User supplied power bricks sounds like an incredibly bad idea at pretty much any scale.

precommunicator• 3 months ago

They say:

We might modify your laptop to remove or power down the battery

rcakebread• 3 months ago

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.

perrygeo2• 3 months ago

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.

GTP• 3 months ago

They aren't targeting big companies for sure, but maybe a small or medium-sized office could make use of this.

perrygeo2• 3 months ago

I don't see it. Hobby projects can use a VPN tunnel to make a data center from local equipment. Real projects that choose colocation have uptime requirements that simply can't be met by random consumer hardware. The venn diagrams don't intersect.

There's no middle ground where you try to run a real business on old laptops. That's insane. You either keep things small/hobby and stay simple, or graduate to production-grade equipment once you have real requirements.

The middle ground, taking on production colocation problems plus the unreliability of random hardware, sounds like the worst of both worlds. There are both simpler and more robust options.

justsomehnguy5• 3 months ago

They aren't targeting no one (and looks like they aren't at all).

Just do the math: for a measly €2000 a month, a salary of a cashier in Amsterdam, you already need to have 285 clients - and this is without taxes and revenue.

Theodores• 3 months ago

I have always dreamed of substituting a really expensive rack of servers with a couple of elderly laptops, with their built in UPS, handy screens, keyboards and trackpads. However, for pet projects, I now have a better way of being cheapskate.

Some ecommerce software stacks really need gargantuan amounts of RAM and CPU, which gets expensive on the cloud. However, it is possible with some software to have everything massively cached, with the cloud doing that, with the origin server in my basement, only accessible from the allowed cache arrangement, therefore having the setup reasonably secure and cheap.

Downsides to this, having customer details in the basement rather than a secure facility, but how many developers have huge customer databases just casually lying around on USB sticks and whatnot? It happens.

PhilippGille• 3 months ago

it is possible with some software to have everything massively cached, with the cloud doing that, with the origin server in my basement, only accessible from the allowed cache arrangement

Do you mean a setup like:

    client -> cloud(HAProxy+Varnish) -WireGuard-> basement(backend)

Or something else?

pocksuppet2• 3 months ago

Don't use "the cloud", rent a moderately-priced server. This "cloud" fetishism (that means AWS/Azure/GCP) has led to billions of dollars in unnecessary revenue for those companies and unnecessary expenses for the rest of the world.

zoobab• 3 months ago

"build a homelab in your own basement, rent a cheap VPS, set up wireguard and viola"

Put an openwrt router in front of your fat server, and for each query it sends a WOL packet to the box, and add some delay to an ethernet bridge.

That was the fat server is mostly sleeping, and only woken up when needed.

Nyr2• 3 months ago

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...

IshKebab2• 3 months ago

I would be really surprised if this was a scam. It doesn't have the smell of a scam at all. Who would target a very tech savvy audience just to get old laptops?

Given that the "sign up" link goes to a survey form, my guess is this is just some idea someone had and they made this page to see if anyone actually wants it before they put any effort into making it happen.

Nyr2• 3 months ago

Colo scams are pretty common. Some percentage of people will offer to send expensive laptops, and the scammers can discard the rest of "interested customers".

It is inviable to colo old laptops, a regulatory nightmare - Hetzner would NEVER accept those in their datacenters. It is also absurd to think they are partnering with Hetzner to begin with.

It makes no sense to believe they will even EXPORT laptops from Europe to the US if you choose the US location. It just makes no sense, so I don't get why I am getting downvoted.

shikaan• 3 months ago

Is this how we bring "works on my machine" in production? /s

chihuahua• 3 months ago

"But it works on my machine!"

"Great. Put your laptop in this box, and we'll send it to the DC."

"Done!"

dabinat• 3 months ago

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.

fnord77• 3 months ago

sounds like a battery fire waiting to happen

joecool1029• 3 months ago

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.

bloomingeek• 3 months ago

Perhaps they just want to steal the parts out of the laptops. If they swindled 5K rubes out of their machines, that's a lot of resale money, no?

kube-system16• 3 months ago

The site is a couple of years old and the domain it refers to is not the one linked here, it is probably an abandoned idea.

geocrasher• 3 months ago

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

spiritplumber• 3 months ago

that's how my university did a linux cluster for exercises

reincoder3• 3 months ago

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.

vrt_• 3 months ago

Interesting challenge! My first thought: 70k probes is a lot and having to set that up is quite a task. Why not develop an phone app with exit node capabilities (similar to Tailscale) so you can use that for probing? The real win is that people move around, obtaining you even more data points from other network.

reincoder3• 3 months ago

We actually have app-based data collection capabilities and initiatives. Our goal, or more appropriately, vision, is to map the internet in real time. This involves SSH access to devices to run different forms of measurements at a very high frequency and have control over those devices.

Managing 70k probes is not going to be super hard.

Managing 1,400 servers is just a normal business operation, not a technical challenge. Each probe has a standard OS-level configuration. Automation and configuration are deployed from a central system. Each probe is actively monitored and troubleshot. Data is dumped to a data warehouse. We make incremental improvements to our network. When servers go down, we talk to vendors.

We do a lot of novel engineering things from the infrastructure, data, and research team. Having a very identical set of servers really allows us to focus on product and performance engineering, not troubleshooting engineering. With application-based probing, I assume it will complicate things quite a bit, as there are different operating systems, different devices, etc.

For us, lately the challenge is not technical. It has been exclusively procurement. This quarter (https://ipinfo.io/blog/probenet-q1-2026-expansion), we exclusively focused on regional diversity which involved outreach to national ISPs or telecoms. Securing servers from telecoms is an extremely bureaucratic and expensive process. So, we are hoping to partner up with eyeball networks and the larger NOG community.

reincoder3• 3 months ago

  ---
  Edit to my parent company
  ---

I am scaling back this enthusiasm a bit. We need to work with mature organizations instead of individuals.

We need SSH through a public IP address and use Ubuntu as an operating system. Since we need to determine where these servers are located, we need to collaborate with universities, various organizations, IXP, DCs, telecom/ISP consulting companies with a mature understanding of network engineering.

iJohnDoe• 3 months ago

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.

JSR_FDED• 3 months ago

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

ltbarcly3• 3 months ago

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.

linsomniac2• 3 months ago

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.

deadlyllama• 3 months ago

EC2 is pricey if it's all you're getting from AWS. If you have wierd requirements, colo may be a good option. Otherwise, just get a VPS or 3 and be done with it. You'll get a virtual KVM that lets you boot it off an ISO and set it up the way you want.

Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode, ... are long established VPS players.

I'm cheap and buy VPSes off deals on lowendtalk.com. e.g. my backups are on a VPS with 3TB disk, 2GB RAM, 1 vCPU, USD7/mo. I suspect your USD80/mo budget would stretch to something amazing, by comparison.

linsomniac2• 3 months ago

I'm familiar with Vultr, DO, Linode, none of them seem to have pricing that is compelling beyond EC2. OVH and Hetzner have some potentially compelling plans, but then I'm only saving a little bit.

The call-out for colo is largely to save me from having to engineer a setup at my house for getting my Dell R720 with 256GB RAM online (switching to bridging, setting up a firewall/load balancer with backup, segmenting the networks). That does become easier if I decide I'm ok with 1gig rather than bumping it up to 10gig.

faangguyindia2• 3 months ago

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.

arjie• 3 months ago

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.

petterroea• 3 months ago

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

subarctic2• 3 months ago

That's what I was thinking too, don't data centers have policies about this stuff? I wonder who'd be liable if your laptop burst into flames

znnajdla• 3 months ago

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.

heopd• 3 months ago

would really like to see a writeup an some pictures about this !

wouterjanl• 3 months ago

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.

imprezagx2026• 3 months ago

I use www.vedos.cz vps hosting for 3$ a month. Prague (CZ - EU)

fortran77• 3 months ago

They remove the battery! That was my first question.

I have an old Lenovo laptop that works fine with the battery completely removed--but I have to disconnect the power and reconnect it before the soft power-on switch will work. I wonder how they handle powering on finicky laptops with those "soft" power buttons.

vhiremath4• 3 months ago

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.

hulitu• 3 months ago

Your old laptop packs more CPU power, RAM, and storage than their entry-level offerings

And, if you are lucky, it can compute PI to the fifth decimal, before the thermals kick in. But the battery life is wonderful. /s

elinear• 3 months ago

If you ship an old laptop with an old HDD, decent chance it will die in shipping.

unixhero• 3 months ago

Yeah but it overheats and also shuts down to save energy

Gabrys1• 3 months ago

I wonder how their KVM works...

trklausss2• 3 months ago

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"?

jve• 3 months ago

Well connectivity (speed) and energy stability may be 2 of them (your internet may go down along with electricity).

Or look at it another way: you wanted to buy/rent a server you intended to put in datacenter anyway. Now you can do the same with laptop.

trklausss2• 3 months ago

Jokes on you I got a 20kWh backup UPS on the entire house.

Now on a serious note: internet can go down anywhere, even for them. There is nowhere stated that, if your old hardware misbehaves, you can use others, and there are privacy concerns with running your stuff on their software stack… So I don’t see a huge advantage honestly.

beAbU• 3 months ago

€7/month is mad considering the hardware is my own.

yonatan80703• 3 months ago

Is it? It doesn't sound outragous to me, given that they provide you with however much power you need, ans also networking and people to maintain the facility.

I asked ChatGPT to estimate how much darwing 15W continuously in Amsterdam would cost you per month, and it came up with a range of 2.58€-3.41€ per month. So that's potentially more than half of their fee.

If your laptop is particularly power efficient, you'd also be subsidizing higher-powered laptops. As far as I see there's nothing preventing you from sending a 400W gaming laptop and mining crypto or running an LLM agent 24/7.

michaelt• 3 months ago

€7/month is both too much and too little.

The cheapest USB KVM-over-IP costs about €50 - that's 8 months of colo fees gone.

Colo 'remote hands' in western countries can cost €120/hour, once all expenses and overheads are taken into account. Admittedly, that's for someone to drop what they're doing and rush to your sever. But getting that laptop unpacked, checked over, labelled, installed in a rack, associated to a customer account, powered up and working is going to cost 3 months of fees at least.

One laptop gets lost or damaged during shipping, or shows up mysteriously broken when the customer claims it worked when they sent it? That's a €200 device gone, 28 months of colo fees. You can argue your way out of it, but the guy doing the arguing is the €120/hour remote hands guy.

It'd be easy to lose money on this.

qmr2• 3 months ago

There's no way they're offering 24/7 KVM for this. Cheap colos you need to write / call to get an on demand KVM then wait some hours or days for a tech to plug it in.

The operator is in no way responsible for shipping damage, not sure why you imply they would be.

radu_floricica• 3 months ago

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".

whateverboat2• 3 months ago

Do you not get memory errors without ECC RAM?

adrian_b• 3 months ago

There are laptops with ECC RAM, but they are uncommon.

Otherwise, the effect of memory errors depends on the use case.

If the laptop or mini-PC is used as a router/firewall/Internet gateway, then memory errors are usually not important, because they would result in corrupted network packets that are likely to be detected at the endpoints of a network connection.

If the laptop or mini-PC is used as an e-mail server or a Web server, then a fraction of the memory errors may result in a stored file that becomes corrupted.

At the small amounts of memory typical for a laptop or mini-PC, unless the PC is many years old there should be no more than a few memory errors per year at most, and the majority of the errors might not result in file corruption, but sometimes they may cause weird behavior requiring a computer reboot.

Anecdotally, during the years I have seen on the Internet a non-negligible amount of big files, e.g. movies, which appear to have bit flips that are likely to have been caused by their hosting on servers without ECC memory. Fortunately, in movies a small number of bit flips will not cause severe quality degradation.

With more valuable data, one must use ECC memory to avoid such problems.

pjerem• 3 months ago

It's ok if you can physically remove the battery. I'm pretty sure to have read multiple times that laptops thermals and battery engineering are optimized for daily use in open areas, not to safely run workloads 24/7 in a closet.

regularfry• 3 months ago

My home lab rack is a toast rack. Literally, that's how I hold the laptops vertically so they get decent airflow, and it also makes for very easy access. As soon as you go past one laptop it's a thing.

kube-system16• 3 months ago

A lot of residential ISPs are hostile to hosting servers in various ways.

whateverboat2• 3 months ago

Two words: ECC RAM

wltr3• 3 months ago

Are you guys even serious on this? Ok, I’d reboot my personal server daily then.

yonatan80703• 3 months ago

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?

kube-system16• 3 months ago

Collocation data centers have “remote hands” technicians for these types of tasks.

c16• 3 months ago

“But it works on my machine…” Then we’ll ship your machine

Is finally possible!

gallypette• 3 months ago

So there is no need for docker anymore.

bArray• 3 months ago

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.

gertrunde• 3 months ago

A colo laptop seems a bit daft, vs a colo 2nd hand micro desktop?

Havoc2• 3 months ago

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

Fokamul• 3 months ago

Also running laptops as 4fun home servers and first thing I do is removing battery, removing whole chassis, even with screen.

You don't need any of those.

KronisLV• 3 months ago

The battery is a fire risk and the entire thermal design isn’t really geared towards 24/7 operation.

I remember having this old Dell Latitude, where you could easily swap out the battery pack with a button/tab thing on the back, without having to open anything else up - I even got a spare bigger capacity battery, but it would work without one altogether when connected to the power brick.

I unironically think that all laptops should be built like that.

ForHackernews• 3 months ago

I assume this startup yanks all the batteries and runs them in a rack with a UPS.

whazor• 3 months ago

The FAQ says: > We might modify your laptop to remove or power down the battery

But powering down battery is not enough against the fire risk. Servers get hot 24/7 and might still overheat the battery.

Tade0• 3 months ago

First thing I learned attempting the same is that lid open vs closed are two very different situations in terms of thermals.

But overall without aggressive throttling these devices work a maximum of half an hour before the components get saturated with heat and performance tanks.

Havoc2• 3 months ago

Yup. Gaming laptops with dedicated GPUs tend to fare better on this because internally the CPU and GPU is often bridged with a heat pipe and shared cooling

So thermals are specd for both running at same time but you only need CPU for home server so shouldn’t throttle

wltr3• 3 months ago

What’s the point if I can just connect it to my router and not pay any money to anyone, expect some electricity price, which would be like ten times cheaper. My old laptop is capable of a gigabit connection and so my home internet. That’s plenty for anything I can imagine.

Redundancy, I hear you saying! What if you’d have no electricity for an hour? OK then. I’d have another laptop at some else place then, and have two powerful servers for like still one fifth of the price. Can you beat that?

matt-p2• 3 months ago

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.

qmr2• 3 months ago

Laptop batteries are lithium ion not lithium polymer.

matt-p2• 3 months ago

Sometimes, but usually polymer these days. e.g the most popular laptop is probably a macbook https://www.apple.com/uk/macbook-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/uk/macbook-air/specs/

eemil• 3 months ago

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.

torginus4• 3 months ago

I mean we literally did this in one of my previous places. We took all the old laptops that were to be junked by IT, and used them as a selenium test farm. We saved like $100k per month on the AWS bill at the cost of basically electricity.

If all the machines were running Windows, the difference would've been even more drastic.

What I dont get is that we have these autoscaling technologies that allow software to be fault tolerant to hardware failure, yet companies still insist on buying expensive server grade HW for everything.

iso1631• 3 months ago

Been through this recently in a fairly large enterprise

We have some in house software which runs in k8s. Total throughput peaks at about 1mbit a second of control traffic - it's controlling some other devices which are on dedicated hardware. Total of 24GB of ram.

The software team say it needs to run across 3 different servers for resilience purposes.

The VM team want to use neutronix as their VM platform, so they can live migrate one VM to another.

They insist on 25gbit networking, and for resilience purposes that needs to be mlagged

The network team also have to have multiple switches and routers, again for resilience.

So rather than having 3 $1000 laptops running bare metal kubes hanging off a pair of $500 1G switches eating maybe 200W, we have a $140k BOM sucking up 2kW.

When something goes wrong all those layers of resilience will no doubt fight each other. The hardware drops, so the VM freezes as it restored onto another host, so K8s moves the workloads, then the VM comes back, the k8s gets confused (maybe? I don't know how k8s works).

It's all needlessly overspecced costing 30 times as much as it should.

But from each individual team it makes sense. They don't want to be blamed if it doesn't work, they don't have to find the money. It's different departments.

brazzy• 3 months ago

What I dont get is that we have these autoscaling technologies that allow software to be fault tolerant to hardware failure, yet companies still insist on buying expensive server grade HW for everything.

Simple: the cost of managing the hardware scales with its heterogenity and reliability. Even just dealing with the dozens of different form factors (air vent placement!) and power units of laptops would be a big headache.

SturgeonsLaw• 3 months ago

Enterprise hardware has companies that your company can call to get support when things go sideways, if they're using a rack full of 5 year old Thinkpads then they're on their own if something breaks

latable• 3 months ago

I would agree with you about autoscaling if ECC was enabled in every consumer computer :'/

pocksuppet2• 3 months ago

We saved like $100k per month on the AWS bill

Did you also compare the bill to places that are not AWS, not Azure, and not GCP?

1minusp• 3 months ago

I'd like to be able to do something similar, but the old batteries in these things seem like a point of catastrophic failure. How is that dealt with?

jhickok• 3 months ago

If it's an offsite backup, you would deal with it like you would any DR site-- either plan for yet another backup, or presume that it's unlikely that both the primary and replica would go down simultaneously and accept the risk.

gunapologist992• 3 months ago

Remove the batteries. Datacenters have redundant power and UPS.

KellyCriterion• 3 months ago

where is the difference in paying 7 USD per month to get some gigabytes at whatever online hoster?

jwr• 3 months ago

Instead of critiquing this immediately, let's consider that this gives a second life to hardware that would otherwise be thrown away.

itomato• 3 months ago

Vibe code SPAs, not this kind of nonsense.

michaelbuckbee• 3 months ago

Very strongly reminds me of Mac Mini Colo - https://www.macminivault.com/mac-mini-colocation/ - it's a clever idea.

evanjrowley• 3 months ago

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.

snowwrestler• 3 months ago

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.

harvie2• 3 months ago

i don't think phones are THAT watertight... they're not tested for long term submersion. usualy they don't even guarantee waterproof rating for more than first two years or when there are signs of wear. should work with some non-conductive oil or fluorintert tho...

Poudlardo• 3 months ago

I think i like the idea. But why specifically laptops, why won't they accept small computers like thinkcentres for example ?

harvie2• 3 months ago

Why not old android phones? :-D

whynotmaybe• 3 months ago

I've wanted to do that with an old laptop and send it to be hosted at a friend's house.

The advantage I found with a laptop :

1. Only two cables, power and ethernet. Installation and removal is quick.

2. Comes bundled with keyboard and screen so no need for monitor

3. Usually very low power consumption and low heat.

4. Light, it can be stored anywhere.

So to answer your question, I'm guessing all of the above?

mikeocool• 3 months ago

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.

paulnpace• 3 months ago

I had this idea for dirt-cheap colo where it's just a warehouse that has warehouse racks for putting whatever you want on the rack. Rates based on linear feet, bandwidth, and power consumption. Power would be delivered with a 15-minute uptime guarantee, meaning you have at least 15 minutes to gracefully shut down in the event of loss of power.

Advantage is reasonably secure location and quality Internet connection. Target market is nerds who don't want all that crap in their closets.

moralestapia• 3 months ago

Hey, this is great. Many of my old laptops become my "servers", so I'd definitely pay for this.

One question I have, in case someone from CoLaptop is reading:

So, one time I had this White "Chiclet" MacBook and I had it powered on all the time, I didn't know at the time but that destroyed the battery and when I unplugged it/plugged it again (because I moved it to a different place after like 4 years) it just didn't power up, fortunately I was able to extract the HDD and its contents.

Now I have one old MacBook Air and one old MacBook Pro as "servers", and I regularly disconnect them from power (but keep them on), I do this for like a day every 3-4 weeks, and haven't had that issue, battery health is still good etc...

So, what do you recommend for this? Or is this something you'll do as part of the CoLo service?

mememememememo• 3 months ago

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.

phendrenad2• 3 months ago

It's an interesting idea, and it might even work for some people who have overpowered gaming laptops that can't run Windows 11 (thanks, Microsoft!). But man, people have no idea how powerful just a few cores of a modern AMD EPYC are. Try a Linode instance with a few dedicated cores and see if that's competitive with shipping your old alienware to a colo.

traderj0e2• 3 months ago

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.

floralhangnail• 3 months ago

Will they let me send my laptop if I'm a North Korean remote worker?

delduca• 3 months ago

Boss: This is not working! Dev: Works on my machine... Boss: Fine, let us deploy your laptop.

up2isomorphism• 3 months ago

Overall good idea but why is had to be a laptop? A mini computer will be much better for this

Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

Related Stories