If you end up building your own, I would donate to the cause. We need tankie.tube more and more with every passing day.

I work in the industry and can talk a tiny bit about my experience with this. I actually don't have a lot of experience working directly with physical equipment. Most of what I do is in the cloud.

1. As far as going into the data center, set up your server. That is something you can do. Data centers do allow that It's just going to depend on your specific data center.

2. Typically they do have data center staff that's on site to do that type of thing, but it's normally an extra fee.Otherwise, I think you have to ship staff out there to do it yourself.

3. I actually don't know about this, but I think there are legal requirements that a data center needs to know who you are in the US. So if you're trying to stay anonymous This is not a great route. Otherwise most data centers work directly with big business and they don't normally accept Monero so you're really gonna have to look around for a data center that'll take cryptocurrency.

Take everything here with a huge grain of salt. I've only been in a data center three times and have only had to give advice on what to do to move out of a data center into the Cloud. This knowledge could be old, it could be archaic, or it could flat be wrong But I wanted to see if I could offer any bit of advice that might be helpful.

Never stop proxying whatever you do.

I don't know fuck-all about colocation or running PeerTube, but in terms of anonymity it may be worth investigating what you can manage through a reverse-proxy and caching. If you need to colocate a server for the purposes of bulk data storage (and perhaps bulk video encoding), this does not need to be a public-facing system. You can run the public-facing Peertube instance on a relatively lighter server located in LA or New York (or anywhere along the backbone) and have it download media from the colocated server when it misses cache. The Feds would be able to find out where it is, but this doesn't change much from the status quo. This would just prevent casuals and chuds from finding the location of your colo (unless the PeerTube instance got hacked).

I kind of do this with my Mastodon instance. The public-facing VPS has limited storage space (which is quite expensive to expand), so about 1TB of user media lives in S3 storage at another host. The machine serving Mastodon reverse-proxies this media from the S3 host and keeps anything requested in a cache for 48 hours. The end users make no contact with the S3 host. In your case, the caching rules would probably need to be more sophisticated. This solution works great for Mastodon because everyone is generally looking at recent content, and scrolling several days back in the timeline is an exception. For a video website, the data access patterns are likely more random.

In your case, instead of a third-party S3 host, it would be your colocated server, but the principle would be the same. The colocated server can be located near you so you can service it personally, add / replace disks, make hardware improvements as needed, but the public website could be hosted anywhere (though it would help if it weren't sending requests across an ocean every time the cache misses) without physical maintenance being your responsibility. In my case, the Mastodon instance and bulk storage are located in different cities, but the connection between them is good enough for it not to be a problem.

Legit data centers will probably want personal info so I don't know how anonymous you can be. You might want to start also looking into legal protection, like placing the site and hardware under an LLC. You can pay extra to incorporate in places like NV. Nevada does not reveal owner information to the public. The down side is you need a registered agent in NV, which you can get for a simple monthly fee. Sell the site to the LLC, put the WHOIS as the company. Put donations into a company checking account plus your own startup cash. Pay for the domain renewal, hardware, services, etc with the company account. For tax purposes the profit/loss goes on your normal yearly taxes. Legally the company is the company and not you. If someone sues the site because they found copyrighted material, or defamation or anything like that, the company gets sued, not you. If the company is forced to sell its assets in a settlement, then that is separate from your personal finances. They can't take your car, house, or personal bank account away. This way, at the very worst, you can walk away without losing everything.

Right now you're renting cloud space/compute. The liability there is a little different than if you owned the hosting yourself. It's worth looking into how that works. You don't want to set up a server and get sued 6mo later and lose everything.

The down side is all this takes paperwork, research, and some ongoing fees. You also have to put profit and loss on your taxes. That can benefit you because losses can be written off and used to help you with your tax burden. But there may be limitations to how long you can take losses and how much. This means you may have to look at a similar but different legal entity like a non profit. You also need to handle the crypto exactly right as to not trigger audits or increase legal exposure. IANAL, so idk.

Really, check the contract for renting space in the data center. That will probably contain some indemnification liability info that lets you know how exposed you are.

Do datacenters let you walk inside to maintain your own server?

Yes. Some are more strict than others. One of our datacenters I have a badge, a pin, and I can get in without alerting anyone. Others I have to schedule it, get greeted at the door, and have them check your ID. And some were really strict about giving them at least one hour heads up. Others you can say I'm OMW and they're cool. It really depends on their polices.

How would someone know it's in your city unless you explicitly say?

If I ship the server to a more remote location, how would I replace failed drives?

Pay like $50 an hour for an employee to replace it for you, and possibly connect a remote crash cart.

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?

They're almost 100% not going to let you be anonymous to them. If you're doing illegal stuff and getting DMCAs out the wazoo they're gonna shut your ass down almost immediately. They shouldn't doxx you (unless you get sued), but you cannot be anonymous to them.

Also FYI colo prices have gone up a lot because of the demand from AI datacenters. Either they want to be one, or people are getting priced out and moving to the cheaper ones. Also U.2 drives are still pretty expensive. I'd stick with spinning rust if you want mass storage. Unless you're planning on having a TON of users that the drives can't keep up. Some colos will let you plunk a tower down on a shelf. So one ATX tower with 8 3.5" drives aint bad.

I don't know dick about shit when it comes to servers but I just wanted to thank you for hosting tankietube. You a real one for sure

I listened to a podcast a while ago on Archive Of Our Own and they actually develop their own CMS and host their own servers. It's all community run so that might be possible. It's a much taller order with video compared to text though

What about tanukitube

First few questions have been answered adequately already, and I can't answer the third, but regarding uptime vs. distance; consider using more than one machine. Depending on your budget it might be worth it to have a couple or more lower-spec machines behind a load balancing / failover proxy. That would give you a fair bit of leeway to get out to the location while maintaining uptime. Also you can use one to troubleshoot the other remotely.

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.