# Does it make any sense to colocate your own hardware for running a single Discourse instance?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/does-it-make-any-sense-to-colocate-your-own-hardware-for-running-a-single-discourse-instance/75310
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Tags:** hosting
**Created:** [December 4, 2017, 5:06am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/does-it-make-any-sense-to-colocate-your-own-hardware-for-running-a-single-discourse-instance/75310 "2017-12-04T05:06:51Z")
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### Author: ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [December 4, 2017, 6:51am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/does-it-make-any-sense-to-colocate-your-own-hardware-for-running-a-single-discourse-instance/75310/3 "2017-12-04T06:51:43Z")

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I never actually wrote that up formally..

> 📣 Overall, **colocation is only worth it if you have a pretty big, heavy, active Discourse instance** – I’ve seen it be worth it for sites with very large 10GB + databases of posts dating back to 2003, for example.
> 
> If your site is small or only moderately active, $20/month (or less) is going to be a better deal, because that’s only $240/year. You can’t get much hardware for $240, even $480.

If you can find a place to cheaply colocate a ~$700 mini-pc – think the Mac Mini colocation services, but extended to cheaper hardware – I do think it’s worth it, bearing in mind the caveat above, this is only proper for fairly large, active Discourse sites. I would not bother colocating very low end hardware, when you can get a very fast Kaby Lake box with nice SSD for $700. Once the hardware is there, it will sit for years, so cheaping out in the beginning is like .. cursing yourself. 🧙 It’s not a good idea.

The other advantage is that [the performance / storage speed of these mini-pcs is really quite high](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-much-is-discourse-affected-by-a-faster-cpu/58407) relative to the average $20/month cloud instance. But again that won’t matter a lot unless your instance is large or busy, or both!

Some ideas:

- **Colocate two boxes** , so if one fails, you can just switch to the other one. Kind of a warm spare sort of thing. Upload the latest backup (obviously stored off-site on S3 or what have you) and you only lose 1 day of activity. But you’d be up and running within an hour, probably?

- **Colocate with a company that rents out their own stable of hardware servers** , then if you have a fail, you’re only paying for them to switch out the box from their stable of existing hardware. Maximum downtime, probably a few hours. Cost per month will be higher though, but hey, no $700 (or $1500) up front investment! Trade-offs, they abound!

- **Buy two boxes, have the colocation center keep one on-hand.** This way you can avoid any monthly costs as the other box won’t be connected to the Internet, just sitting nearby ready to spring into action when powered on; give the colocation center a call, swap the cables, power up and you’re back and running. Maximum downtime, a few hours, maybe?

- **Buy two boxes, keep one at home primed, updated, and ready to ship.** Maybe the datacenter won’t allow you to keep a spare on site? This way if one fails you can deliver the pre-built replacement to the datacenter fast, maybe fedex overnight. Maximum downtime, two-ish days?

I do feel that modern hardware is pretty darn reliable, provided you go with a quality SSD vendor – I heartily recommend Samsung based on our experience using them. But, as they say, 💩 happens. In general, you need to **decide how OK you are with outage / downtime lengths**. That’s what you are betting against here. For some sites, two days, or two hours, of downtime might not be a big deal.

You’d need to research and decide what your budget is vs. your risk tolerance.. and your willingness to be a sysadmin on your own site.

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