> "provided that you are operating at sufficient scale" Nothing says you have to do it all on your own. Let the DC operator do the heavy lifting, all you have

> "provided that you are operating at sufficient scale" Nothing says you have to do it all on your own. Let the DC operator do the heavy lifting, all you have to do is rent a dedicated server, VPS or colocate. Total spend to sufficient scale: a few dollars - a few grand per month. > That's a big if, the internet, startups and business in > general are uncertain and it's often very difficult to > know what your 95th percentile will look like in the > future. It's really not that hard. Look at historical usage and assume it continues as before. If you are worried have a spare dedicated server or two with 1G/10G interfaces. > Also, it's unlikely that your network utilization is > constant. A utilization rate of 50% would be ambitious. This really is a moot point as you effectively only pay for peak usage with 95th percentile billing. Alternatively you can pay per terabyte of traffic, which is effectively average usage. Average usage also correlates strongly with peak usage, so in the end it's all the same, give or take a constant. > So a better comparison is 44k for 1gig in 2 datacenters > vs 102k for AWS (17/2*12), assuming you can predict your > network utilization pretty well. Nope. A proper comparison is about $1000 per month for two dedicated servers in two DCs versus $102k per year for AWS.