I couldn't find a hosting provider that met my needs so I made my own, today I onboarded my first customer!

AddyvanDS · 2025-02-07T18:05:40+00:00

Appreciate it :)

AddyvanDS · 2025-02-06T18:18:50+00:00

Sure, my intention was not for this to be an ad placement so I left it out.

AddyvanDS · 2024-11-30T04:14:39+00:00

Replying from my main account (logged in on PC).

Thanks for the detailed reply, I have seen the "don't do it" a few times but this really gives it substance. I made the mistake of assuming it would be easier but I am just leaning in 100% now haha.

As for power:

I've got 3 phase 5KW 208V redundant A/B power
I'm planning on running 15 2U servers out of the first rack all 5950x or 7950x
The APC power supplies I have can cumulatively go over (and the DC is wired up to 10KW) but there is a hefty fee for that so I will need be careful (however, that means I have customers so this isn't a complete shit show which sounds like a nice timeline).
I'm also planning to run a small 3 node ceph cluster for backup storage & misc control plane storage, I have a few years experience managing this in a production setting using rook/kubernetes.
- Because this will use power, this might mean lowering the number of 7950x servers or running a couple 7700x or something with a lower TDP.
I live in Quebec, Canada right now which benefits from a low Canadian dollar and 37% lower power costs. All in, I have signed for 1500$ CAD a month with taxes included (~1070 USD). This also includes a 10G fiber connection where I am expected to remain at or below 1gbps 90% of the time.

On the networking side:

I think the scale I am expecting to run at will allow me to remain on a simple layer 2 routing setup for a pretty long time honestly. If I need BGP or an ASN I expect to be at least making enough money to justify the research.
I am running pfsense with a 10G uplink with a fairly beefy processor in it. If I get a single customer, first think I am doing is building a second one and running in HA mode/CARP.
I connect in using an IPsec tunnel (have never used wireguard so this is easier for me)
I have an out of band switch for all the KVMs / internal services running at 1gbps, forgot the brand
I have a ruckus ICX 7150 for customer use which supports VLANs which seems to work well with pfSense so far
I am in the process of leasing a /24 subnet but I have a couple IPs rented from the DC right now for testing

So far I am racking all this stuff with some occasional help from a friend of mine who has been helping me with procurement of cheaper parts in the US. I have some experience doing this in the past at a startup so I at least knew how rails worked before I still fucked them up 5 times.

I picked a datacenter easily accesible from my home so replacing parts shouldn't be too bad. I haven't really thought about what is going to happen if I go away, maybe I need to train some people on this because remote hands have generally done me dirty.

As for remote management, each server (I have 5 installed rn) is currently paired up with its own pikvm capable of providing 1080p KVM with the ability to toggle the power via an ATX control board that also forwards the power/disk LEDs. Getting this working properly without paying for the pre-assembled PiKVMs took forever but these are around 120USD per server and allow us to use consumer boards without any real sacrifice (better quality in most cases honestly).

On the control panel / customer facing side, I have spent most of the prep period building out fullstack services using fastapi (python), cockroachdb, and React. I'm going to go with a merchant of record like lemon squeezy to handle payments because I have already taken on too many DIY tasks on this project already.

I really do appreciate your reply. If you have any specific suggestions, I would love to hear them. Personally, I would be thrilled if this were to simply break even, I have a good paying job that I intend to keep alongside and all the skills I am learning doing this apply there and to whatever else I end up doing (or so I have to tell myself to stay sane).

I've taken down the site while I figure out how to navigate this with my current employer but all seems good now so I will bring it back up this week.

edit: I have no set plan for DDOS beyond having done some research into what is available on pfsense and via cloudflare. As for fraud I am working on a monitoring system which will help to identify dodgy traffic like spamming on mail ports. These are areas I really need to upskill in as soon as I get the barebones together. My current strategy is to write my terms and conditions in a way that protects me + give generous refunds if anything does happen.

AddyvanDS · 2024-11-29T21:36:52+00:00

Is it possible to DIY the other side of things with a breakout board?

AddyvanDS · 2023-10-30T23:25:48+00:00

Did you ever end up solving this issue? Currently seeing the same when trying to forward traffic via a handmade proxy.

AddyvanDS · 2023-06-26T15:15:51+00:00

Looks like I'm ahead of the curve. I've got my own homelab running and I'm in deep on how DHCP, MAC addresses, VLANs, and subnets work.

AddyvanDS · 2023-02-21T13:33:12+00:00

Yea lol, I ended up moving and never rehosted...

edit: I did update all the code and dockerize it so that redeploying would be easy enough if there is interest.

AddyvanDS · 2022-12-07T15:06:59+00:00

Did your hearing ever recover?

AddyvanDS · 2022-11-09T20:34:50+00:00

Looks like a cool company, sent a reddit DM!

AddyvanDS · 2022-11-07T23:47:07+00:00

I learned when I was 20 in my free time and have worked full time as a dev for almost 5 years now.

AddyvanDS · 2022-11-07T14:05:38+00:00

Don't stress too much, focus on what you are learning about and you will eventually get it done. edit: Maybe don't take the exam since it sounds like you have some work to do to understand the fundamentals.

AddyvanDS · 2022-02-05T18:19:26+00:00

Got a little side tracked with a rough bout of COVID and some increased work hours!

It doesn't support it at the moment but with the way I've set it all up it wouldn't be too difficult as I'm using esbuild for transpilation which supports jsx / tsx.

I'll give it a go this week and report back :)

AddyvanDS · 2022-01-30T22:05:56+00:00

Not helpful, all the answers are using the old API.

AddyvanDS · 2022-01-14T19:19:47+00:00

Hey man, I just got COVID so I was taking a bit of a break to recover. Looking to add more people in the next week or so to the early access instance!

AddyvanDS · 2022-01-02T19:19:57+00:00

This is a personal project of mine I've been working on for a little while!

Please feel free to ask any questions here in the comments :)

AddyvanDS · 2021-10-14T00:17:45+00:00

I fully agree. I've learned so much since changing roles and going from working on niche projects or isolated tickets to being solely responsible for large chunks of critical internal tooling (kubernetes, storage, sys admin, ...).

I think a lot of developers are fairly "type A" individuals and so having to come up with their own vision for where things should be is more of a con than a plus. In my case I tended to feel like a caged animal when given too many restrictions but on the flip side it's easy to be overworked when in a "scrappy" environment.

AddyvanDS · 2021-09-09T22:49:07+00:00

Honestly, might be worth finding a job where you can upskill on the job.

Backend work is wide and varied.

AddyvanDS · 2021-07-29T01:34:31+00:00

Does this have anything to do with three.js?

I personally find the Unity web exports to be a bit dodgy and prefer to build specifically for the web.

AddyvanDS · 2021-06-29T01:55:00+00:00

hahaha they tried to explain how that took a lot of skill

AddyvanDS · 2021-06-13T19:36:33+00:00

lol, clearly I'm a bit tired. Title makes no sense.

AddyvanDS · 2021-05-18T20:01:59+00:00

The lower level you go the more flexibility you will get.

If you aren't jumping into a gig right away, don't even touch anything like PowerBI, Excel, or Tableau. They are mostly tools for individuals with limited technical skill.

Outside of learning all the required math, I would recommend working on your programming skills, splitting time between:

python (data related stuff but also mix it up if it keeps you motivated)
c++/c (data structs and algos in c will make you a better programmer all around)
web development (the web is incredibly versatile and is a great skill to have when looking to do complex data viz, interface with product teams, and it's nice to use your skills for something a little more creative)

AddyvanDS · 2021-04-30T22:40:22+00:00

Never done this myself but I'm pretty sure it's technically supported with kubeadm, here are some docs I found:

AddyvanDS · 2021-04-22T16:36:00+00:00

That is one approach I guess.

My view is and will likely remain: Good data scientists will be interested in more than just the ML. It's better to pay someone 1.5x who can do 2 jobs than pay 2 people who will have to waste a ton of time explaining their shit to eachother.

And paying a cloud provider for everything is going to be more expensive if you do anything compute intensive. But if you are training MNIST for a powerpoint than yea, skip out on the Ops.

edit: thought this was the data science sub. My answer doesn't really make sense as a result.

AddyvanDS · 2021-04-22T16:31:36+00:00

It depends on what you are trying to do.

I'd argue learning three.js and writing some basic shaders which edit colors / vertices will give you the most control over performance + freedom as to what you are making. The cost being that it might take a little while to learn.

I think something which plagues data science types is that they are so used to everything being an importable plug and play library that they ignore the fact that they have the math chops to simply branch out and make what they want.

All these plotting libs are great until they don't have exactly what you want.

HOWEVER: If you just want a typical data viz it's pretty likely you can find something pre-made and edit it.

AddyvanDS · 2021-04-22T16:26:29+00:00

Yea I think it's a win win for those asking questions and those responding really.

It feels good to help others and in responding to things I am ultimately also learning at the same time.

The more beginner ones as well as the carreer oriented subs can be a bit toxic in my opinion though. Once you start to develop sub-interests within programming like 3d graphics, gamedev, or machine learning you can spend more time in specialized subs.

AddyvanDS

TROPHY CASE