Oh hey, our new website design is live:

https://colocataires.dev/

It's more reflective of what we actually are (nerds carving out a friendly hosting company in a "scrapped" datacentre, with recycled servers) and it features a new pricing page which is either more or less confusing than the old one. Let us know!

Did you know we run the whole thing off approx 550W of power? Seven physical servers, two switches and all of our VMs, serving thousands of users, for less power than a security light!

Colocataires: Host with Friends

We offer artisanal server colocation and virtual machine hosting in our Ottawa, Canada-based data center. Pick from our standard rackmount or VM options or propose something custom.

@colocataires Hello! I read through your site and first of all, the design is lovely and I admire the amber dark mode. However, I’m not familiar with rack mount sizing. Perhaps a dumb Q., but would your service be compatible with colocating my own Mac Mini into your space/connections? I’ve always wanted to make better use of my spare M1 mini, and I would love to support your services.

@tunafishtiger Thank you! 😊 -- a Mac Mini would count under our TinyMiniMicro tier -- we'd put it on a shelf. It looks like it draws between 10W and 50W so that's fine -- it'd cost CAD $50/month to host it.

(Probably worth the extra $1/m for an IPv4; I don't know if a Mac is happy on an IPv6-only network).

You'd need to ship to our registered address on our site (2 Epworth) -- the only downer is that there might be taxes to pay on arrival in Canada, of around 13% of the value of the item.

@tunafishtiger No one has actually sent us a machine from outside of the country before, so it's a little uncharted for us.

We would pay the taxes and pass them on to you by invoice, but it's worth keeping in mind.

(And at the end of your time with us, when we send the machine back, you'd probably pay taxes _again_ to bring it back to the US 😦 )

@colocataires Any idea how much taxes would be for a 16GB/8core M1 Mini or how those are calculated? I really don't mind at all unless it was over a hundred dollars each time, and even then, I'm happy to proceed. This will be way more affordable per spec than what I'm paying right now for a measly 2vcpu-4gb-120gb-intel VPS at Digital Ocean for $47 USD per month.

@tunafishtiger Unfortunately no experience with how taxes are worked out. I'd expect it to be 13% of the fair-market-value of the package (as filled in on the customs declaration) - that's the equivalent of sales tax in Ontario.

Sending a drive at the same time should be fine: is it bus powered or would it need its own power?

I've no experience with Asahi but remotely managing macOS in the past was a pain. Perhaps things have improved in these last few years?

@tunafishtiger Alternatively a 16G/8C/120GiB VPS with us would be C$40 which is only about US$30 for the equivalent of what DigitalOcean is charging you for much less computer 🤷