Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements

1. It depends on what part of the world you are in, but many homes have cooling needs for at least part of the year. The needs to remove excess heat would go up if you are adding more heat -- and it is less efficient to do this at the scale of an individual home than it is at DC scale.

2. Power requirements: While many homelabs have UPS systems -- they lack often lack backup generators, redundant A+B power infrastructure, and don't have the required power density for higher powered servers.

3. Connectivity requirements: most homes don't have access to the connectivity that data centers do.

4. Security requirements: homes simply can't meet the security requirements of most data protection regulations -- things like barriers, access control systems, surveillance, fire protection -- are anywhere from intrusive to completely impossible in a home.

5. Access requirements: homes aren't conducive to a technician responding to an outage at 3am

And those are just the big ones.

The problem is DNS and access to the IP network

So if you can figure out how to build reliable DNS access/approvals with cloudflare etc then it would work

The biggest challenge at the largest scale is political because then you’re gonna be fighting all of the ISP’s and the giant technology companies and ultimately they’re never going to allow for this

Either take it over on their own by offering their own service which people would sign up for

or they’ll just pressure every ISP or certificate authority to not recognize routes that are not going through “allowed” data centers,

most likely you would end up with a series of state bills or even a federal regulation that prevents data routing for public consumption unless it in some kind of “security standard” or whatever bullshit they come up with

That said, my plex server for my friends is on an ups and I'm on 1Gb fiber and I have better uptime than AWS.

A house older than 30 years typically has 100A 120V split phase power which can supply 25000 watts (you wouldn't want to ever fully load it...)

And an 8000 watt space heater will definitely be noisy, and produce too much heat for pretty much any house.

2. If servers are distributed then downtime is distributed, you can virtually guarantee that some of the servers over the world will be online so you can get effectively 100% uptime, something that is not possible in a data center

3. To serve tokens you need very little bandwidth, it's just text in and out

4. All of this is down to the HW and the SW itself, not the building. That is, the box that's being deployed.

5. Just switch to a different server until the problem is resolved, in this model there is no urgency. You just need redundancy which you can afford with how much cheaper this would be.