84
Investing in a server with mass storage would "pay for itself" in less than a year, compared to what I'm currently renting (I'm low key scared to look up the prices of DDR5 RAM and NVMe drives though). Since I plan to maintain TankieTube "forever", it seems like the best option.
I'm so ready to ditch BackBlaze because their timeout errors are causing ~90% of the current problems with the website (external storage move failures and buffering problems). 
I have plenty of experience assembling computers and the thought of building a server is really fun, but I've never used colocation before.
Questions/Thoughts/Concerns:
- Do datacenters let you walk inside to maintain your own server? There is a datacenter in my home city, which would be convenient, but using it would effectively soft-doxx my location. Right now "Burgerland" is as specific as I publicly reveal.
- If I ship the server to a more remote location, how would I replace failed drives? Is that a commonly provided service? Would using a datacenter within ~2 hours driving distance be the best compromise between accessibility and location obfuscation?
- Is paying with Monero an option? Is it a good idea? Could I mail replacement drives directly to the datacenter without revealing my home return address?
It looks like I'll need NVMe drives in something called the U.2 form factor (instead of M.2) in order to enable hot swapping. TIL.
Look into renting a dedicated server instead (bare metal, not cloud). Colocation is a headache and I’m not even sure how much money it would save you as you’re still paying the datacenter for bandwidth and remote hands to fix the server when something breaks.
Anonymity might be hard because you have to pay for the thing but i’m sure you can find a hosting provider that accepts crypto if you’re both in the US or US/Europe. Then just give the provider a bogus name and anonymous email. Just pick your contact info carefully as there is still a minimal fraud check for these type of things.
With dedicated hosting the provider maintains all the hardware, you handle everything from the OS up remotely. Unless there’s a specific reason you want to colocate (sorry didn’t read the whole post) that’s the way I would go.
I currently rent an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D dedicated server (with 128 GB DDR5 and a 2 TB NVMe) for $221.83/mo^[and 10 Gb/s with 100 TB of traffic for an additional $117.93/month]). How much would that cost to build?
Even if I stick with renting the primary server, I think I'll colocate a mass storage server to replace BackBlaze.
Edit: I just gandered at RAM prices
I don't know a whole lot about it. But do you really need 128 GB of ram?
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
No. I just need the CPU. But most dedicated servers with powerful CPUs come with lots of RAM.
Then if you were to make your own you could use less ram at least.
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.