Services & Features

• Colocation in Ottawa for rackmount and other form factors.
• Unlimited bandwidth.
• VPS hosting built on libvirt and Ceph.
• Custom-built control panel.
• Out-of-band management port for physical servers.
• Serial console access for virtual servers.
• BGP sessions available for customers.

Two Guys & a Rack

We're Pawan Dubey & Aaron Brady, two Ottawa locals and self-hosting enthusiasts who just wanted to put some servers in a datacentre. We'd outgrown running things at our homes where noise, space and Ottawa Hydro's reliability were a problem.

What we found was that no-one is set up to deal with enthusiasts; like people who want to do their own install or using machines other than power-hungry 1U rack-mount servers.

We aren't the only people who want something more flexible. There are dozens of us. After talking about it for a year we started Colocataires: a place for like-minded people & friends to host.

Some Customers

• tilde.town: a computer made for sharing and home to 3000 users.

  tilde.town got a faster machine for less money by moving away from the cloud. Their install was live-blogged and streamed. Community members sent stickers for the machine. Can't do that with a droplet.

• tiny.tilde.website: a Mastodon server with 60 active users.

  ttw stopped having outages when it moved in with Colocataires. Formerly staunchly hosted from home, it took 11 days of downtime in 2023 due to power interruptions before moving.

Technical Stuff

Colocataires has a 42U rack at PureColo. You can see some of our network-neighbours in the building at PeeringDB.

We have dual power to our rack, with generator backup, and we commit to 1 kilowatt of power usage. We're currently consuming 551W. Our power is generated from approximately 84% non‑emitting sources.

We're a registered Local Internet Registry with ARIN, COLOC-151. We advertise our 256 IPv4 addresses and 4.95 octillion IPv6 addresses via AS401604.

We're peered with Hurricane Electric and we don't charge for bandwidth.

Philosophy

• Use second hand gear.

  Our standard virtualization servers are 8th generation HP ProLiant machines with Sandy Bridge processors, stuffed full of RAM and disks.

  These machines are ten years old, written off by the businesses that owned them before being purchased from IT recyclers and refurbished. We upgrade the firmwares, add new disks and 10GbE networking and put them right back into service.

  While they draw ~100W each, that power is amortized across a dozen customers without over-subscribing their RAM or CPU cores.

• Redundant architecture.

  If you are going to use ten-year-old machines, you need to be prepared for failures. Two is one and one is none.

  We always keep spare capacity to continue hosting our virtualization customers in the case of a machine failure. We replicate our storage to a minimum of two machines.

• Use Ontario's mostly-green power. And not too much.

  Being real: the greenest option is to not do any of this. But if you're going to have a datacentre using electricity, Ontario is a great place to do it.

  Datacentre power is at a premium. We enjoy the challenge of running a whole rack in the power budget that other companies use for a single server.

• Stay small.

  Colocataires has no external investors. We're entirely bootstrapped by the founders. Our goal isn't to maximize profit: we just want this to exist, in a financially sustainable way.