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Website copyright is out of date by two years... And the website has been online since then. https://crt.sh/?q=colaptop.pages.dev

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Also colaptop.com is not even registered anymore. If I had to guess the pages.dev site stayed up but the domain and email are nowhere.

My off-site backup is a thinkpad x230 with a 1 TB HDD. It's currently at my friends house, and I access it with tailscale. 7 eur/month to colocate this in a datacenter with stable (and fast) Internet + power seems like a pretty good deal.

I can understand some of the concerns with user-provided hardware. Maybe a better model, would be for CoLaptop to offer hardware themselves. This would allow them to standardize on a few models, which opens up many possible improvements such as central DC power, power efficient BIOS settings, enclosures with cooling ducts, etc. They can still follow the "old laptop as a server" model by buying off-lease laptops from the corporate world.

This is basically the same price as the cheapest options on Hetzner: https://snipboard.io/C9epWo.jpg. Sure my old laptop does have more RAM and a bigger SSD, but I bet it's also less reliable than Hetzner's servers, and is likely to suddenly die some day. So is the tradeoff really worth it? It's hard for me to believe that this is a genuine improvement for most things. The only definite winning case I can think of is if I have a process I want to run, but I don't care if it just suddenly stops working. But when would that ever be the case? and to save a couple dollars per month?

Edit: Maybe this is what github is doing :P

To support lots of ISPs, universities, and different organizations we have been asking them if they have an old laptop lying around that they can host our software on. Goal is to reach 70,000 probes within the next couple of years.

It is a simple probe software and we share some data or we can pay 20-30 bucks a month for it. We have a couple of NUCs in remote regions but no laptops yet. Basically, we are even happy if an ISP (or any one) hosts our software from a laptop dangling by a charging cable from a socket in some random corner.

We can send over a RPI or NUC, but with remote hands, and setup and all that it can get quite expensive. So, we always first ask if they have an old laptop lying around and can install our software there.

For us, at least, we are not interested in the hardware aspect. We are interested in the network. The old laptop approach only acts as a last resort. We will be more than happy to go with the predictability of a traditional VPS hosted in a traditional data center. Colocation, no matter what form it takes, involves a lot of moving parts.

Its a page hosted on CLoudFlare's "pages.dev" service. Their method of contact is a Google Form which does have an email address on this domain "CoLaptop [dot] com", but that as a web address does not work.

I'm not sure they have their act together.

- Mount something in a rack not firmly attached to brackets or a shelf

- Install anything with a battery larger than you'd find in a RAID card

Not to mention all the other ways this is sub-par in terms of airflow, density, serviceability, out-of-band management, etc.

I get the allure of it, but I wouldn't really want my gear anywhere near a bunch of laptops stuck in a cabinet.

Ah, and obviously you put a claude/codex on it, so your actual work is just ... installing claude, and maybe a linux. The rest is done by the AI - setup, scripting etc.

As a colocated option... I see it work for some people. But it'd be a niche offering, when the whole value proposition is "make my own, with blackjack and hookers".

But colocation?

Strip away the learning component and add production uptime requirements - why would you even consider using crusty old laptops for this? If you have production grade needs, look to a standard cloud provider or, at the very least, a colo facility where you can put production-grade equipment.

So this is probably a joke site or a scam.

It’s OKish as a starting point into selfhosted world but overall not ideal. The battery is a fire risk and the entire thermal design isn’t really geared towards 24/7 operation.

Not really something I’d co locate unless it was a DC physically near me so that stopping by is easy

I wonder if Hetzner knows their aim.

> We might modify your laptop to remove or power down the battery, wireless radios, etc. to ensure it can be used safely in the data center.

Yeah, just use the DC's UPS.

Laptops aren't designed to be servers - peg your laptop CPU and GPU at 100% and see how long it lasts, I've done this before and the answer is about "2 months", yep sure, this effort isn't targeting that workload, but how many bad apples does it take to start a fire? In their page they say "kubernetes server - no problem" kubernetes DOES keep the CPUs busy, not pegged, but busy enough so that they wont step down their frequency.

I admire the effort to reuse old tech, but boy oh boy would I not want to be a sysadmin here!

My biggest complaint used to be that it would occasionally restart after a system update and I’d have to unlock FileVault in person, but macOS 26 now allows unlocks over ssh.

How would this work when the old hardware inevitably needs to be serviced (mechanical hard drive failure, memory errors, dust buildup, etc)?

Would they have technicians on-site available to service whatever random laptop you send them? If your laptop dies do they ship it back to you so you can fix it and send it back?

Or what if you bork the OS by accident? Will their KVM solution allow you to upload an ISO and plug it in over some USB drive emulation?

+ The usual limiting factor in data centers is power, so laptops could be more optimized for greater cycle efficiency per power than comparable old servers.

+ Laptops are generally compact and so achieve greater rack densities than individual co-lo servers. I'm thinking about 34 or 51 laptops could be stored in 9 or 10U either 2 or 3 rows deep by 17 wide.

+ Shipping a laptop to a co-lo data center is cheaper than a 1U server.

~ Reusing electronics saves e-waste and reduces unnecessary consumption, either old servers or old laptops.

- Laptops lack ECC RAM.

- Laptops typically don't use nearly as fast CPUs or RAM as contemporaneous servers.

- Laptops are limited in their storage options.

- Laptops lack remote, lights-out management of real servers.

- Repairing old failed laptop components is more difficult than old servers.

~ Old laptops tend not to have usable batteries, so there's unlikely to be much an inherently distributed battery backup capability.

- Old laptop batteries of various origins could be a li-ion NMC fire hazard at scale.

~ Reusing old stuff at any sort of scale would prefer standardization, and it's sometimes difficult to amass many of the same discontinued model.

Conclusion: Do it if it works for you. It's kinda cool.

There is no way they are partnering with Hetzner, or charging just 7€/month flat rate... they specifically want to know the model of the laptop, and offer to send send a courrier to your door...

I lose ownership of my laptop, you install whatever software you want on it (with the security risks that it conveys) and in turn "you let me connect to my computer"?

Redundancy, I hear you saying! What if you’d have no electricity for an hour? OK then. I’d have another laptop at some else place then, and have two powerful servers for like still one fifth of the price. Can you beat that?

One question I have, in case someone from CoLaptop is reading:

So, one time I had this White "Chiclet" MacBook and I had it powered on all the time, I didn't know at the time but that destroyed the battery and when I unplugged it/plugged it again (because I moved it to a different place after like 4 years) it just didn't power up, fortunately I was able to extract the HDD and its contents.

Now I have one old MacBook Air and one old MacBook Pro as "servers", and I regularly disconnect them from power (but keep them on), I do this for like a day every 3-4 weeks, and haven't had that issue, battery health is still good etc...

So, what do you recommend for this? Or is this something you'll do as part of the CoLo service?

If I was a hetzner customer I'd be pissed if my server burned because someone's 2 minute battery life 10 year old school pc was hosted in the neighbouring rack.

Doesn't seem like a great business idea.

[1]: anecdotally, seems everyone has a laptop lying around with a cursed battery

I have never colo'd my laptop, but I do work off my Windows laptop from my Mac via Parsec (remote viewing software for gaming) and by flipping system settings so my Windows machine never turns off when connected to the power bank and lid is closed. There are obviously hiccups (if internet goes out, if Windows decides to restart from an update, etc.), but it mostly just works and I think I've only had 2 instances in the past 3 months where it's gone offline. I use Tailscale on top to provide a universal mouse server for my 3d mouse, and I'm able to magically CAD from my Mac.

Highly recommend if you need to use one OS/machine for some specific software (especially if it's beefy/heavy) but prefer using another as your daily driver.

The trouble is a lot of laptops won't power-on with the screen closed and have heavy sleep/suspend behaviors in general. Not to mention general airflow in whatever shelving system is used with the laptops, assuming 2-4 laptops per shelf, per 1u. Not to mention, one would probably want/need some means of ensuring appropriate driver support, or an appropriate Linux or other setup for said hardware.

While I can see it working, depending on shipping costs can definitely see some problematic bits.

Advantage is reasonably secure location and quality Internet connection. Target market is nerds who don't want all that crap in their closets.

ISTR one was basically just industrial office space that was running a lower-tier colo, and another was some guys in a metro area that got a rack in a data center and were spreading the cost around with other like-minded folks. At my work I have machines in an Iron Mountain facility, but for personal projects I don't need anything like that, but I'd like something that's more capable than AWS that I'm paying $80/mo for a couple VMs.

So they're going to open the laptop up and make hardware modifications to random laptops sent in? May as well have a VPS at that point.

A far better business offering would have been to offer pre-selected physical devices where such things are well known.

A ton of old batteries in one place. The batteries themselves are probably not a concern, but if something happens to the facility, then you have a ton of problems.

Security of the facility is a concern if someone can get in and walk out with an armful of laptops.

Laptops don’t scale from a stacking stand point. Sure, close the lids and line them up. Then you’ll have a lot of failures. Older laptops are intended to cool through the keyboard and top vents by the screen.

Even then, you’re probably better off with Cloudflare tunnel and using it as a home server.

I have an old Lenovo laptop that works fine with the battery completely removed--but I have to disconnect the power and reconnect it before the soft power-on switch will work. I wonder how they handle powering on finicky laptops with those "soft" power buttons.

But getting some closet case computer with unknown hardware and turning it into a server, at scale, is an impossible scheme.

The only way to make it work would be to buy hundreds of laptops at once and refurb, new storage, and standardize with custom power delivery. Because who wants hundreds of laptop PSU's plugged into power strips. And those do in fact die.

And then there's the horror of manually removing wifi hardware and batteries. Battery disposal is an issue. And having worked on hundreds of laptops, some of them are major pains in the neck to get to the battery. Consumer HP's come to mind. The bottom cover can be difficult to remove without breaking any of the clips.

Point of Reference: 27 years in web hosting

Is finally possible!

if you do not use their platform specific features, it's better to run on bare metal with redundancy.

Or run the laptop at home and tunnel

Also sounds like a recipe for fire.

And, if you are lucky, it can compute PI to the fifth decimal, before the thermals kick in. But the battery life is wonderful. /s