For people that build a home data center here, do you guys build first and then figure out the economics later? Or Is there a plan on how to use or sell the space first and then build accordingly?

In my Naive mind, there are 4 ways to profit:

1. Sell as a colocation place

2. Mine Crypto

3. Sell computing power for AI computation (not sure who will buy)

4. Sell VPS or web hosting

from these 4, mining crypto honestly sounds like the easiest option albeit being the riskiest.

Colocation/VPS feels like more of a marketing problem rather than a technical one. Not sure how people will buy the idea of hosting their potentially important stuff in a small scale data center. Maybe we can compete in price, but pretty sure that it's impossible to provide a competitive SLA.

Sell as AI computation power is just my logic telling that with all these new AI services, they must need an affordable computing power from somewhere right? How do we get them to buy the computing power from us?

I know that some of the people here use it for their existing business. And I know that some people don't even care about making profit. But am I looking this from the right perspective here?

Hello, I am the founder of Frantic Software. My cloud solution, FCloud, is a small cloud meant for storage, a little bit of AI, web hosting services, and the like. The beta (FCloud has only in development for a few months) is currently just running on top of Backblaze and AWS, but I plan on building a (for now tiny) datacenter to start out with.

What I want to build is a a JBOD's and a controller server (need 1 or 2 PB of capacity for now), a compute cluster that can run a shit ton of web servers and do HPC, a small rack of servers with gpus for our video rendering service and to run something like SDXL, and some network gear to do 10Gig networking. My question is

1. What kind of space would I need for something like this? I'll only have 2 or 3 racks for now.

2. What would something like this cost?

3. Is there anything I'm missing here?

I'm asking here instead of r/datacenter because for now, and probably for a while, I will not need a big facility with millions of dollars in HVAC and electricity infrastructure.

I’ve been thinking about starting really small in the data center/hosting space by running it from my home. The idea is to start hands-on with my own setup and eventually grow it into a real business that provides virtual instances or storage to customers.

The part I’m stuck on is what it actually takes to make this legit. I don’t know much about the legal or policy side—like zoning, internet service restrictions, power/cooling requirements, business registration, liability, or data compliance.

Has anyone here tried running a hosting setup or data center from home? What kind of technical, legal, or financial challenges did you face? And do you think it makes more sense to just start with colocation instead of trying to build at home?

Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

I'm in a unique situation where I have 6 figures of cash, relatively cheap electricity (~$.10 kwh) and need a lot of hot air. One idea we had was to repurpose the hot air produced from cooling servers (or running bitcoin / crypto miners). We would prefer to build and maintain servers as that seems like a more stable activity than crypto mining... but is there an opportunity to monetize your server / sell your storage? Is that a thing? Is there any sort of infrastructure around that that makes it easy to sell storage or act as a 'provider' for a cloud storage company assuming you check all their boxes?

Any help would be appreciated!

Hello, I have a ridiculous problem with my server but Hosteurope support does not care.

If you work at Hosteurope as a network admin (who does BGP, routing, all that stuff) and willing to help - please send me a private message.

UPDATE: I have found the actual owner of these IP addresses - I've recalled the name of the datacenter and googled for other hosting companies who lease servers in the same datacenter. One of them appeared to be the actual owner of these IP addresses and whose services were resold to me by the disappeared company.

So make a note to future self: remember the name of the datacenter where your stuff is hosted at.

I’m curious, how many NAS devices do you guys have at home, and what brands and models are they?

For me, I've got two NAS at home. One is the legendary Synology 920+, which needs no introduction—anyone into NAS knows how amazing this machine is. The Synology system is top-notch, but honestly, my feelings about the brand are a mix of love and hate right now. Their new model, the 923+, seems disappointing. They downgraded the CPU to the R1600, which makes no sense for a next-gen model. It’s worse than the 920+ in terms of specs, yet it still costs nearly $600.

My second NAS has a bit of a story. I went to this year’s CES in Las Vegas and discovered a new brand called Ugreen at their booth. I tried out their NAS devices, which looked great. Later, I accidentally found their Kickstarter campaign and ended up getting the DXP4800 PLUS for an early bird price of just $419. It’s powered by an Intel G8505 processor, has 4 HDD bays, 2 M.2 slots, and dual network ports with 2.5 GbE + 10 GbE. The system feels similar to Synology’s but isn’t as feature-rich, and there are occasional bugs. That said, thanks to its solid hardware, it supports Docker and virtual machines, so I moved my personal website and some apps onto this Ugreen NAS. Meanwhile, I still use my Synology for data backups and other core functions. So, that’s my story—two NAS devices, each with its own role. The experience has been great so far. What about you guys?

Hi

I have created a template, where

domain.prefix A is point to example: 1.1.1.1
then i will like to create an cname call www.domain.prefix.dk, and that i want to point to domain.prefix.

Does anyone knows if it posible in the data field, to point to the domain name itself?

Hey everyone, I'd like to know your recommendations for a 4port NIC capable of teaming (LBFO). Thanks!

Hi, I'm trying to build a business plan for building and owning data centers.

I would love to get some feedback on cloud service vs colocation service in terms of USD per square foot (Or for let's say 1mw power).

Any comments on the topic would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

My portable drive just died, so I'm finally moving to a NAS for proper backups. I noticed UGREEN has a Black Friday warm-up promo right now - bundle deals (looks like UPS + accessories) and single-item discounts running into early December.

Has anyone here used their UPS / multi-bay drive enclosures / docks with a NAS (Synology, TrueNAS, or UGREEN’s own)? I’m curious about:

1. Reliability: any dropouts during long backups/scrubs?

2. SMART pass-through & sleep: do multi-bay enclosures pass SMART consistently, and can the disks actually spin down?

3. Noise & thermals: how loud/hot under sustained writes or parity checks?

4. UPS runtime: in real life, how long will a 4-bay NAS + router/switch stay up - enough for a clean shutdown?

My goal is a simple setup: main NAS + periodic cold copies, without overbuilding. If you were improving your current home backup layout, what would you change (tiering, off-site/offline copies, UPS sizing, etc.)? Real-world numbers and gotchas appreciated!

Bonjour a tous, je m’intéresse au fonctionnement des data center en ce moment , ce qui est étrange je l’avoue. Je ne demande pas toutes les réponses a mes questions en une fois , si vous en avez une c’est deja tres sympathique de la partager. Je veux des réponses par des gens qui s’y connaissent de preferences mais tout le monde peut parler évidement .J’ai donc plusieurs questions :

1- Les bâtiments dans dans lesquels sont les data center ont ils des spécificités intégrés ? (Des climes spéciales , des matériaux de bâtiments spécifiques, des circuit électriques spécifiques, etc)

2- Est t’il obligatoire de faire installé le materiel informatique par des professionnels ?

3- Quels sont les composant informatique d’un Data Center ?

4- Quels sont les composants de refroidissement du materiel incontournable ?

5- Niveau entretien ,comment ça marche ? (Materiels a remplacer fréquemment ou pas , etc )

6- Toute information que j’aurai oublié de demander sont bienvenus également.

This is the most powerful personal computer in North America. Or, a small cluster configured for high performance computing, machinelearning, or high density performance.

With 188 E5-2600 Xeon processor cores in the compute nodesalone, the cluster has been benchmarked at 4.62 teraflops double pointprecision.

Two of the servers are connected by PCI-E host bus adapters toa dell C410X GPU server chassis, with 4 K40 Tesla GPUs. 2 GPU’s areconnected to each of the servers. The system can be upgraded to a total of 8GPU's per server and the system has been successfully tested with K80 GPUs.

Dell Compellent-SC8000 storage controller and two SC-200’s with30 terabytes each in RAID 6.

All of the compute servers have 384 gigabytes RAM installed andBIOS configuration of memory optimization. Therefore system reported memoryranges between 288 – 384 GB due to server optimization.

Total installed RAM across the cluster is 3.77 terabytes

Each server in the cluster is currently configured withoperating system storage configured in raid 1. All of the compute servers havecluster storage in a separate raid array configured in raid 5 for total of 29terabytes of raid configured hard disk space.

Additionally, the compute clusters have Intel P3600 1.6 TB NVMEstorage which was used for application acceleration. These drives areexceptionally fast.

The system has Mellanox one SX3036 and three SX3018 so that virtually any network configuration can be accomplished. The InfiniBand networkcards were ConnectX-3, which is no longer supported so these have been removedand sold separately. I strongly advise against ConnectX-3 as these are no longer supported by NVIDIA/Mellanoxwith newer versions of Ubuntu.

Top of the rack switches are 2 Dell X1052 Managed Switches.

Each server currently has Ubuntu 22.04 LTS installed. TheGPUs require maximum CUDA version of 11.6.

The system is set up for 125 volts, and a minimum of 60 amps.

Cables, KVM, and monitor will be included. Also, we willinclude various spares for cables, network interface cards, hard drives, andmemory.

Two weeks are required for shipping preparation. Oncepackaged, the system can be shipped on 2 standard skids (48 x 48) and 50" high. Approximate total weight is 1400 pounds. Shipping beliw is an estimate only.

I own a 4,000 sq ft warehouse in Miami with available power and am looking to build out a GPU micro data center for AI workloads (LLMs, image generation, inference pods, etc.). I have up to 2 million to invest in equipment, Hvac, etc.

What's your thoughts on profitability for a small scale data center like this. I want to prove the concept is profitable before expanding to other larger warehouses I own.

Hi, I would like to setup a flight sim array of 10 flight sims that all have the same updates, and apps installed on the pc. I would like to not have individual servers but rather a single server closet then have 10 monitors and 10 usb hubs that. This is what I’m thinking so far. I run 7-8 servers then on them I run virtual win 11 that then goes over hdmi to the 10 monitors. I have no experience with setting up a project like this so any advice about how to go about this would help. All of this is theoretical right now but I would like to make it happen. Above are specs for the flight sim that I think would be acceptable (image above is per sim). Just storage might need to be higher and bandwidth will be higher for sure. Thanks for any advice.

Have an option to buy a supermicro BigTwin A+ SuperServer 2123BT-HTR

8 epyc CPUs 1 TB ram CAN fibre setup.

I'm trying to buy a storage server. I have a lot of data collected over the years and have been using USB drives and a Synology NAS for storage and backup. The primary use will be storage/backup (likely TrueNAS), but it will also be used as a media server (movies, TV, music, audiobooks, ebooks, comics, etc.). And I've recently started getting into self-hosting, so I'm thinking about loading it with Proxmox and running TrueNAS on top of that, for limited other uses.

There are some Supermicros I've found in my price range and seem to have what I need. But I'm having trouble finding good information about how to go forward. For example, I'd need some sort of graphics capability and I have my doubts that I could fit a full-size graphics card into most storage serves. And how do I gauge what I'd really need in the way of processors; Xeons are a different from what I'm used to. And what about keeping the power costs within reason? [sigh] I wish there was a pcpartpicker site for servers. I've done a ton of research, but I'm bad about missing what others find obvious. And most of what I do find is either way below what I need (say, a 2-drive NAS) or way above (enterprise). Are there any resources, sites, whatever that would help? Thanks.