Post #634801
2026-03-13 07:19 UTC
Fastmail @fastmail has been operating on bare metal for 25 years. Their planning and (over-)provisioning strategy reminds me of Wikimedia.
Situations where cloud renting is cost effective for medium or large companies are vanishingly rare, and always have been. As with so many big tech patterns, this is a myth held up by VC-backed startups and incentives.
https://www.fastmail.com/blog/why-we-use-our-own-hardware/
#Fastmail #baremetal #sustainability #CloudExit #CloudRepatriation #selfhosted #SelfHosting
Replies (2)
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@koen_hufkens@mastodon.social 2026-03-13 07:27
@krinkle @fastmail Hear hear, I set up a lab (academic) and the first thing I did was buy bare metal hardware (beefy workstations/servers) instead of buy into the cloud solutions available. Stuffed these things to the brim with RAM, and these are now worth more than their weight in gold. The lesson, independent of price swings, what you own you control - and the cost of use goes down not up. What you rent 🤷♂️
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@chiffchaff@tech.lgbt 2026-03-15 13:29
@krinkle @fastmail This is another thing I'm glad to be free of now I'm out of IT: deck-powered groupthink.