Source
r/PleX•
forkwhilef0rk

Does anyone host their server in a datacenter?

Discussion

I used to have Comcast Gigabit Pro fiber at home (which is 2Gbps dedicated enterprise metro-ethernet fiber, very different from e.g. Verizon Fios - see here for an explanation) but had to switch to Fios because Comcast doubled my monthly price to >$300. My power has gone out a few times recently as well. Overall, it's not an ideal setup for a server that should be highly available.

My plex setup takes 5U in my rack at home (1U for the compute and 4U for the storage (about 130TB)). I have a full rack in a datacenter in Ashburn, VA with some extra space. I run my own ASN with multiple upstreams, so I know the network is good.

I'm seriously considering doing a migration to the datacenter. The only additional cost I might incur would be a bandwidth commit upgrade (and maybe a power upgrade but I don't think I'm close to my limit).

Has anyone else done this? What is your setup like?

Posted Aug 4, 2020, 6:32 AM UTC

108
always-paranoid•

I have a backup/plex server that I have in a Datacenter with a solid connection and it works very well all over the world

5
MorallyDeplorable•

When I started with my team at work they had a Plex server set up at one of our datacenters. They just never filed the ticket to have DC staff recycle an old box and put Plex on it. They had to stop when management caught wind. I wasn't involved, but pretty sure some final warnings were issued.

3
Gardakkani7-6700K | 48GB RAM | GTX 1660 Super | 37TB•

yeah that's just straight unprofessional and childish

3
forkwhilef0rkOP•

Lol, yeah I can see how management might not appreciate that. In this case the rack is totally mine so I don't have that problem.

1
YukaTLG•

I've considered it but the costs were prohibitive for me. If you already have rackspace and Power-pipe-ping in a datacenter I imagine it would be worth it.

I would highly recommend go through all of the potential what-ifs for remote management. I'm sure you already have a lot of the supporting infrastructure/equipment in place via your ASN.

While I haven't put my equipment into a datacenter/colo I did run it out of my garage for over a year while I was on the other side of the planet. It ran flawlessly. 100% system uptime (lost connection due to ISP failure a few times) and survived several power failures due to UPS and the house having an automatic generator. The system maintenance/health was the biggest factor and I honestly went with the KISS method. I ran Plex on Ubuntu server and stripped the OS of everything I didn't need to run Plex so there was less to possibly break and storage was managed via FreeBSD with ZFS and I made sure I had 2 warm spare hard disk drives, a warm spare SSD in the disk shelf on the array with 2 parity drives - that way if I had a drive fail I could remotely drop that disk from the ZFS pool and add one of the warm spares. I attribute the success to me getting all my ducks in a row on all of the what ifs.

You may not have to go as extreme as I did with the warm spares because you could always go to the datacenter and swap the drive or have a datacenter employee do it for you. I didn't have that option.

3
[deleted]•

[deleted]

2
forkwhilef0rkOP•

Big agree on the OOB management. Out of curiosity, why Texas? Surely there are closer DCs to you.

1
[deleted]•

[deleted]

2
DonDino1•

I've played around with hosting Plex on a VPS. Works fine, and it's just like streaming any other video service at home. I have used around 200GB/month when watching stuff every evening, so bandwidth shouldn't be an issue. Obviously this is slightly different to your proposed setup, but if it works on a VPS, it should work fine on bare metal too (which I assume your setup will be).

1
forkwhilef0rkOP•

It would be a VM but on hardware that I own. That's how it is now, too. I would just physically move the server into the datacenter.

1