Do you know what the most cost effective hardware for general internet stuff is currently? I do ML and have to deal with removing tens of kilowatts from a small closet when it comes to on prem stuff - mainly for compliance reasons - and I have no idea what good, cheap low power hardware for web, sql and similar servers is.

For general internet stuff, a Mac mini or any SFF pc will be just fine. For ML, you’ll need at least a dozen or more thousand for GPU’s if you run your own inference. If you use a 3rd party, like OpenAI, it’s just an API call and you can do that on your SFF mini or pi.

Web hosts can start at $10 (or free + internet) and GPU hosts can start at $4,000 USD.

At peak, a “cluster node” could be $10,000 and a GPU node could be $80,000.

The question you have to ask yourself is: what are your requirements.

Yeah with 30 bucks a month for co loc, I cant expect them to run for years

even if they can sustain that, how the heat and energy health for that cheap building

Mac minis are quite expensive. I'm trying to rebuild my home server and it will be probably Chinese minipc Ryzen 5700u, still tdwp 25 IIRC

Depends on the Mac mini model I think; used Mac mini m4 16gb 256gb are priced quite low compared to the performance - I believe close to best bang for the buck - and are I believe near best energy efficiency. I love them for heavy cpu tasks without loud fans and heat in my office (pcs did this in my previous homelab setup for a bit less performance).

The higher specced max minis (more memory or pro) Are worse bang for buck.

I'd love to have possibility to compare M4 with Ryzen 5700u as a server. I've read a comparison of M1 against 5700u and it was quite good price for value tbh.

EDIT According to some site M4 is 2 times faster and 3 times more expensive, while you can later add memory to Ryzen but not to M4

They’re not too badly priced if you buy them used… no where near as cheap as a one of the small Lenovos, Dells or HPs though or as easy to upgrade

What I really want is a IP KVM that connects to a MacMini using a single Thunderbolt port for everything - power, video, keyboard and mouse

That kvm product is a great idea.

They are indeed expensive, but wow are they fast, and they have 10GE options.

Thanks for sharing.

I came to a similar conclusion: TiniMiniMicro 1L PCs are in many ways a better option than Raspberry Pis. Or any mini PC with an Intel N-series CPU.

Another thing I had issues with cheap small time colocation was that people were using it for spamming/phishing and they got the whole ISP IP range blocked with spamhaus. I was running a legit mailserver so it was really annoying.

I rooted around on the block for a bit and I found several phishing sites, it was a mess.

The problem is the more serious colocators don't really want you if you just want 1U. And if they allow it it's definitely not for a good price.

From their perspective, the users seeking the cheapest price will probably be the most trouble!

Probably yes, but it's also that setting up all the physical access administration etc might not be worth it for them for a customer that pays $15 a month. Which is what I used to pay for my 1U (including power, but it was a super low energy server)

For 1U I'd generally just opt for a rented managed server unless I had a really compelling reason for why I wanted to use specifically my own hardware (e.g. I needed something very esotheric).

Yes I had something very esoteric. I had a Sun SPARC first and then later a Mac mini converted to 1U.

The SPARC was slower and had less memory than the first raspberry pi ;) yes that was a while ago. The Mac mini was obviously later.

So the people back in 2021 in the prior Hacker News discussion saying that they were worried about component failures … turned out to be worrying about completely the wrong thing. (-:

If you're using good power supplies, name brand microSD cards, and don't hammer them with writes all day, you can have a Pi 2/3/4/5 running for years with no stability issues.

I think 99% of problems people have are related to one of those three things (same with most embedded devices, but people tend not to throw a cheap used phone charger and the SD card that came with an old cheap drone on more specialized devices).

yeah, i was using my pi3 as pihole adblock for at least 4 years before upgrading to mini pc.

You can do a hell of a lot with 120 watts even on an x86 platform nowadays, which wasn’t as true back then.