VPS to a coloed server, my homelab journey - Part 2

After the Virtual Private Servers

After loosing one of my virtual private servers along with the data in the ‘The Great Fire of OVH 🔥’¹ (Yes I know I should have had backups of that VPS²), I thought why not setup a Proxmox³ Cluster⁴ on a couple dedicated servers.

So I went ahead and found OneProvider.com where you can rent dedicated servers for cheap, their cheap hardware is old and the connectivity is ok but you cannot beat there pricing (Server with an Intel Atom C2750, 16 Gb Ram, 1Tb Hard drive and 1Gb of ‘unlimited’ bandwidth was €14 per server/month at the time). That went great for a couple of months but I kept getting frustrated with not having full control over the hardware and my growing interest for BGP⁵ and how the internet is really just a bunch of (small) inter connected networks. After some trial and error I decided I should review my home-lab goals and re-think my shopping list.

The Shopping List

So what did I want?

• My own (recent-ish) hardware
• A Decent Host for my hardware (Colocation Provider)
• BGP transit connection with my own leased /24 block of IPs

Bonus:

• 10 Gb connection to the internet

I now had a plan and a decent shopping list, although we didn’t talk about budget. Lets just say around €700 for the hardware and another €100-120 per month for the hosting.

A Decent Host for my hardware

I first found a great host for my hardware while browsing LaFibre.info a french forum about fiber to the home and IT in general. The host I chose is MilkyWan, they are a small not for profit internet service provider run by a small passionate team.

They specialise in providing Virtual Servers, Hosting, ADSL and Fiber Internet. They also have multiple points of presence in french datacenters where they can host hardware and provide BGP transit. They also have a great community on telegram.

Cost : €75 for 1U Server Housing, Power and Network Connection.

Bonus: They can provide a 10Gb connection to the internet.

Did I mention they have a great community, being charity run means that they hold annual meeting and have the best interests of their members at heart. Since the end of 2022 I am also an elected representative of the members to the charity comity

My own (recent-ish) hardware

Now I had found somewhere for my hardware, I actually needed some hardware. I found what I needed in BargainHardware.co.uk, they specialise in secondhand enterprise hardware and have great prices.

Here is the server I settled on:

Dell Poweredge R620

• 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2660 V2 2.20Ghz Ten Core CPUs
• 96 Gb of DDR3 RAM
• 2 x 240 Gb Crucial SSDs for the boot drives (They will be in Raid 1 to provide redundancy in case of a drive failure)
• 6 x 900 Gb SAS Hard drives for the datadrives to give us a total of 5Tb usable space (This will be the main storage pool and will be in a ZFS pool to provide redundancy in case of a drive failure)
• 1 x Dell BCM57800S Quad Port - 1GbE, 10GbE SFP+, RJ45 network card

Cost: €700 including shipping to france.

Not too old to be inefficient to run and not too recent that it breaks the bank. This should provide me with plenty of horsepower to multiple virtual machines.

Putting it all together

After ordering the server and ordering the hosting, all I had to do is setup Proxmox and then ship my brand new server to Milkywan and they racked it for me in their datacenter.

I now have my own hardware with a 10G connection in a french datacenter. You may notice in the image of the speedtest below that my name appears as the ISP, that’s because I have effectively become my own ISP as I provide my server with internet via my own ASN (AS211486) and IPs. (Cloudflare has a great explainer on BGP⁵)

My server hosts most of my ‘homelab’ including parts of this website, like the comment system and the statistics. I also have a small setup at home with a NAS and a microserver which I will probably write another post about that.

My server is the last machine in the rack on the header image of this post. Have you wanted or have setup your own homelab? Share your thoughts below.

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Other posts in this series:

• VPS to a coloed server, my homelab journey - Part 1
• VPS to a coloed server, my homelab journey - Part 2