MacMiniColo Launches $99/Month Mac Pro Colocation Service

Basically your internet and elec. bills at home will be reduced...but certainly not by $99 a month!!!

This service is for people who either a. don't like money, or b. are too stupid to set up a headless server at home.

you have no idea what youre talking about. this is for small businesses running remote servers/services for critical events that want the reliability of a hosted data center. you dont run a notification server out of your living room...

MacMiniColo makes sense, for me

No, the monthly subscription doesn't even get you a machine. All it does is connect the machine that you yourself have to pay for to a high bandwidth internet connection.

Basically your internet and elec. bills at home will be reduced...but certainly not by $99 a month!!!

This service is for people who either a. don't like money, or b. are too stupid to set up a headless server at home.

I appreciate money, and I'm not too stupid to setup a headless server at home... In fact, I worked for Sun Microsystems for 16 years, was the Product Manager for our first Multiprocessor system, taught Unix, System Administration, and am an award-winning, bestselling app developer. I tried the headless server at home approach, but there are issues.

I've tried RoadRunner Business Class and my own Mac mini server, but RRBC went down frequently and they never seemed to care. I also had to have reliable power, and that was an issue a couple of times, even with a UPS. To not have to worry about my internet and power and just have my Mac server work is great. I can even reboot it from my iPhone/iPad.

Why do businesses need a Mac Mini server as opposed to Linux? Well, in my case, there are specific features of Mac OS and third party software that only run on Mac OS, and are required for my server. Plus the Mac mini is a 'known' quantity... if I need to replace it, I can do so without worrying if Dell/etc. still make the system/components in some random PC box. In fact, MacMiniColo has spares on hand if needed.

I've been using MacMiniColo for years and they're great. They are reliable, professional and affordable.

The MacPro version of their colocation service is about twice the cost, not counting the hardware (I supplied my own Mac mini, but they offer them for sale... when the Pro is more plentiful, they will as well.) so I'm not sure I'll upgrade but if the demands on my server increase, it's nice to know that's an option.

If some people can't see the value, that's on them.

This reminds me of Adobe's Creative Cloud. With colocation, you're basically paying a monthly lease on a Mac that you don't own. I'm not clear what the advantage is, unless you're always traveling. And wouldn't you need a computer anyway to in order to connect?

Can someone explain how all this works?

It's for web servers, file servers, push notification servers, etc. Doesn't usually apply to most normal consumers. I haven't looked into it too deeply, but I've been considering a MacMiniColo to use with open source software to create my own Dropbox with huge amounts of space, along with maybe a Minecraft server and web server for my freelance site and my friend's personal sites.

Edit to add: Here is a good list of uses posted on their blog: http://blog.macminicolo.net/post/47038825502/50-ways-to-use-your-server (http://blog.macminicolo.net/post/47038825502/50-ways-to-use-your-server)

This reminds me of Adobe's Creative Cloud. With colocation, you're basically paying a monthly lease on a Mac that you don't own. I'm not clear what the advantage is, unless you're always traveling. And wouldn't you need a computer anyway to in order to connect?

A lease is completely tax deductible, whereas softwAre sand hardware purchases have to be depreciated over 5 years.

This reminds me of Adobe's Creative Cloud. With colocation, you're basically paying a monthly lease on a Mac that you don't own. I'm not clear what the advantage is, unless you're always traveling. And wouldn't you need a computer anyway to in order to connect?

No, with colo you own the hardware. And this has nothing to do with leasing software. (At least with Adobe's cloud you're paying them to stay up to date—like leasing a car, except you get access to the dealer's whole lot when you need it. With colocation you're just renting space and bandwidth on data center's rack.)

I haven't looked into it too deeply, but I've been considering a MacMiniColo to use with open source software to create my own Dropbox with huge amounts of space, along with maybe a Minecraft server and web server for my freelance site and my friend's personal sites.

TBH I love the Mac but it really makes a crappy server. The beauty of a good server is the majority of the time, you shouldn't need to touch it—and there's where Mac OS X's strength is. You want to use it.

Mac as a general purpose internet server hasn't really made much sense with the falling cost of hardware. Remember, Apple is a hardware company and would love to sell you new hardware every year but for servers, it might be every 3 or 4.

When I need a server that's public facing on the internet, Linux is better, cheaper, and faster. These days, dedicated servers are overpowered and expensive, especially if you need to buy the hardware upfront. If you need a lot of power, you can easily scale up via VPS and let your provider take care of the ongoing hardware upgrades. Seriously, Linode gives me 2 TB bandwidth and 1 GB RAM for $20/month. (The only thing that's not so good there is disk space. Typically internet apps don't need much by way of disk space but if you're hosting a lot of files, S3 or something similar could be a better option.)

Not sure why I would want this. Maybe if you were a Maya artist and needed to render on a faster machine than laptops offer?

There's actually cloud render farms that specialize in this. You upload your Cinema 4D or Maya or 3Ds or whatever file and you rent CPU time. They'll spit out the frames you need. But unless you're rendering long scenes or huge video, there's no substitute for having your own Mac Pro or 2.

Can someone explain how all this works?