Here in Europe I’ve seen a few Raspberry Pi colocation offers lately. It all started out with edis appearing on hackernews, telling they’re offering free colocation. Of course the offer was sold out by the time I got there, but I made it into their second batch of offers.
So I setup my Pi and sent it to them. Because of the overwhelming number of sign-ups it took awhile till it got installed. Unfortunately I must have misconfigured it, because it didn’t respond. I thought I must have made a network config error, but it ended up being a kernel panic. Yes, as it seems one of their tech guys actually went there and checked. They even offered a reinstall, which I gladly agreed to. After that all went smoothly. They didn’t even charge anything for it, so I decided to send them an Amazon gift certificate as sign of appreciation.
A few weeks later, another colocation offer showed up: raspberrycolocation.com. A nice intro page, but as soon as you get to the ordering process it turns Dutch on you. Luckily Google Translate and me knowing German was enough to understand what was said. They are offering at least one year of free colocation. You can either prepare a Pi and send it to them, as with edis, or buy one preconfigured. This time I was lazy and chose the latter option. The prices where so nice, that preparing and shipping one would have been equally expensive. This Pi is scheduled to be installed at then end of June.
I’ve heard of another colocation offer, catering to Swedish citizen, and I’m sure a few more will follow.
One of the main tasks is probably building some sort of rack to host and access the Pis efficiently. Building those racks was probably where most of the delays come from. Either that, or the manual work needed to go there and plug them in. Continue reading
