Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers(colaptop.pages.dev)
41 pointsby argentum472 hours ago14 comments
  • corvada minute 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    Website copyright is out of date by two years...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.

  • pinkmuffinere9 minutes 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

    • foobarian4 minutes 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.
  • danesparza5 minutes ago
    Does anybody know if they also accept mac minis? Or is the keyboard/display a fundamental requirement to their offering?
  • donohoe18 minutes 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.

  • optimus_banana16 minutes 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).
  • JVIDELa few seconds ago
    Wait, whats the point of this if I can have my old laptop running in my garage?
  • lizardking6 minutes ago
    This is the most vibe-coded looking website possible
    • aerhardt3 minutes ago
      It’s as if Claude Code and Bootstrap 3 had had an illegitimate child.
  • schlecht_17 minutes ago
    This seems fishy...
  • cat-turner15 minutes ago
    I presently use an extra laptop to compute and run for batch jobs. Easy, fast.
  • argentum472 hours ago
    A friend of mine sent it to me and it seems like an interesting option now that hardware pricing has gone insane?
  • sixothree28 minutes 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.
  • tiku12 minutes ago
    Yeah for dev purposes perhaps. Production would be another story.
  • opengrass28 minutes ago
    pages.dev, you can't be serious.
    • darrylb4227 minutes ago
      Looks like an April 1st article, but there is no date on it.
  • malux852 hours 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!

    • skullone22 minutes 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.
    • 2OEH8eoCRo022 minutes ago
      I run my home server laptop with battery removed.
    • cucumber373284216 minutes ago
      I worked for a place that did something akin to this in the early 2010s. 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. They 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.