Finally migrated off rented colo to owned gear

Finally free from the colo tax. 18 months of planning for this teardown. Went from €40/mo at some ancient Contabo VPS to a full rack at a buddy's warehouse. The math on inference vs rent never worked for me

Pics below. Dual epyc setup, 8x a6000s for llm stuff. Not the fastest for training but the vram/$, chef's kiss. 48gb each means I can run 70b quants without offloading. Ngl the migration was a nightmare, 3am cable runs and learning how to actually terminate fiber instead of paying someone.

Cage teardown starts tomorrow. Will document the carnage.

Pro tip: before you fully kill that colo contract, spin up an Oracle Cloud free tier arm instance as a warm spare. Heads up: the always-free tier caps at 4 ocpu / 24gb ram but the outbound is surprisingly usable.

1. Register with a card that won't expire soon (verification hold only)
2. Request the home region closest to your new location
3. Boot ampere a1, install wireguard
4. Replicate your dns secondary there before you lose colo bgp

I ran this dance for 6 months during my own exit. The free tier saved my tail when the cross-connect got cut during move day.