Colo Adventures! (Part 1?)

Posted on Jul 2, 2026

It’s been a while. I need to remember how to write stuff.

So, as it stands, I’m currently renting a bare metal box from ColoCrossing. With hosting getting more expensive everywhere, renting one of their old boxes sounded like a good solution to my ever inflating hosting costs. Right now, I’m using an older SuperMicro server. It’s fine for what we need now, but the cost isn’t much less than the cost of doing colo through them. Thankfully, I’m a tech hoarder, so I had a bunch of old rackmount gear that I was no longer using. I moved off my 19" rack and rebuilt everything in desktop cases and in a 10" rack (a full 19" rack takes up a lot of space in a townhouse). With Buffalo being a relatively short drive, I got one of my older HP servers up and running.

Current box:

  • 4c/8t E3-1240v3
  • 32GB RAM
  • 1TB SSD
  • Single PSU
  • Proxmox VE 9

New box:

  • 10c/20t E5-2660v2
  • 192GB RAM
  • 2x2TB SATA SSD (RAID 1)
  • 2x128GB NVMe (ZFS Mirror)
  • 6x900GB 10k HDD (RAID-5 w/ hot spare)
  • Redundant PSUs
  • Also Proxmox VE 9

For a $30/mo cost increase, it’s a pretty substantial capacity upgrade. However, it comes with the downside that I can’t just fire tickets off and have my issues fixed. My issues are my issues, unless I pay for “remote hands”, and their office is too close to home to not just make the drive and do it myself. Either way, I want this thing to be as bulletproof as it can be before I drop it off. We currently have a /29 space that we may or may not use all of. The goal is to migrate our Fluxer instance along with consolidating the services I have running on another VPS elsewhere. However, now that we have a significant space increase, we’re going to add in Forgejo hosting, a NextCloud instance, and a file share of some sort to help with digital preservation and assist with distributing things however we can. I’ll come up with a way to request data for preservation at some point.

DM me and call me stupid or point out all the issues with my implementation plan.

Host:

  • Proxmox VE (no-subscription)
  • Proxmox Backup Server (no-subscription)
  • Additional virtual network without inbound routing
    • I want PostgreSQL on a separate VM, but it doesn’t need a public facing IPv4 address.

VM 1 (Fluxer, primarily):

  • Specs:
    • 8 cores
    • 64GB RAM
    • 200GB disk (on SATA array)
    • Public IP
  • Software:
    • Docker
  • Containers:
    • Caddy
    • Fluxer API, gateway, worker, etc.
    • Livekit
    • Meilisearch
    • Nats
    • Valkey

VM 2 (PostgreSQL):

  • Specs:
    • 4 cores
    • 32GB RAM
    • 128GB disk (the whole NVMe array)
    • Internal-only IP
  • Software:
    • PostgreSQL

VM 3 (Everything else, mostly):

  • Specs:
    • 4 cores
    • 32GB RAM
    • 200GB disk (on SSD array)
    • 4TB disk (on HDD array)
    • Public IP
  • Software:
    • Certbot
    • Docker
    • nginx
  • Containers:
    • Copyparty
    • Fluxer media proxies
    • Forgejo
    • Nextcloud
    • SeaweedFS

VM 4 (Backups):

  • Specs:
    • 2 cores
    • 16GB RAM
    • 64GB disk (on SATA array)
    • 1TB disk (on HDD array)
    • Offsite S3 (Wasabi maybe?)
    • Internal-only IP
  • Software:
    • Proxmox Backup Server