Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

There are laptops with ECC RAM, but they are uncommon.

Otherwise, the effect of memory errors depends on the use case.

If the laptop or mini-PC is used as a router/firewall/Internet gateway, then memory errors are usually not important, because they would result in corrupted network packets that are likely to be detected at the endpoints of a network connection.

If the laptop or mini-PC is used as an e-mail server or a Web server, then a fraction of the memory errors may result in a stored file that becomes corrupted.

At the small amounts of memory typical for a laptop or mini-PC, unless the PC is many years old there should be no more than a few memory errors per year at most, and the majority of the errors might not result in file corruption, but sometimes they may cause weird behavior requiring a computer reboot.

Anecdotally, during the years I have seen on the Internet a non-negligible amount of big files, e.g. movies, which appear to have bit flips that are likely to have been caused by their hosting on servers without ECC memory. Fortunately, in movies a small number of bit flips will not cause severe quality degradation.

With more valuable data, one must use ECC memory to avoid such problems.

€7/month is both too much and too little.

The cheapest USB KVM-over-IP costs about €50 - that's 8 months of colo fees gone.

Colo 'remote hands' in western countries can cost €120/hour, once all expenses and overheads are taken into account. Admittedly, that's for someone to drop what they're doing and rush to your sever. But getting that laptop unpacked, checked over, labelled, installed in a rack, associated to a customer account, powered up and working is going to cost 3 months of fees at least.

One laptop gets lost or damaged during shipping, or shows up mysteriously broken when the customer claims it worked when they sent it? That's a €200 device gone, 28 months of colo fees. You can argue your way out of it, but the guy doing the arguing is the €120/hour remote hands guy.

It'd be easy to lose money on this.

> Your laptop should be fully functional with a working power supply and either an ethernet port or USB port for connectivity. Age isn't a factor. We might modify your laptop to remove or power down the battery, wireless radios, etc. to ensure it can be used safely in the data center.

So they're going to open the laptop up and make hardware modifications to random laptops sent in? May as well have a VPS at that point.

A far better business offering would have been to offer pre-selected physical devices where such things are well known.

The Pi Pico doesn't have networking capabilities, so that would be silly. You're probably thinking of the Pi Zero.

Ran an old laptop as home server for years.

It’s OKish as a starting point into selfhosted world but overall not ideal. The battery is a fire risk and the entire thermal design isn’t really geared towards 24/7 operation.

Not really something I’d co locate unless it was a DC physically near me so that stopping by is easy