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The title is about owning a server but all the points he makes are about owning and managing a whole Data Center by yourself. Of course that complicates matters

The title is about owning a server but all the points he makes are about owning and managing a whole Data Center by yourself. Of course that complicates matters ! What I don't understand is why wouldn't they take for example collocating their servers in multiple, geographically distributed, Data Centers. Also, this doesn't need to be black and white. One could use "the cloud" to offload peak traffic/computation but if you have a predictable usage pattern, it becomes economical to also own hardware. And I think this is the core of the matter: if you have an unpredictable scenario, it's better to rent. And being that startups and new projects are by definition rather volatile, it makes sense not to invest money into hardware. Not to mention that unless the company / project takes off, there is no money to actually buy hardware upfront. There is also no time to manage that hardware.

wmf 17y ago
All his complaints about managing a "datacenter" also apply to colo.
imajes 17y ago
As a startup, owning hardware (or, sometimes, leasing) tends to eat up on your balance sheet really quickly as a cap ex (capital expenditure). You're immediately spending money and taking runway off the table and turning it into illiquid assets. So sure, raw hardware you own in a rack somewhere is probably cheaper over 18 months. But then you're still stuck with it after 18 months (whereas you can just swap out for a larger sized ec2 in the space of a few minutes, whenever you want, without penalty). Then again, unless you're buying a whole cage/closet you're probably paying the top whack fee anyhow, since data centers almost always deal with negotiating on the cage/closet level - anything smaller is typically not worth it to them. So you're paying full rate for your 2u box, and sitting on hardware that's depreciating. Plus, to get into the good datacenters, the ones that have provable disaster recovery, multi homed bandwidth, power and cooling , you will need to prove your creditworthiness and such. But that's OK - you'll stake all you got to get a couple cheap servers hosted somewhere that won't go down (and if it did, be trivial to heal) Finally: to the point about predictable usage lowering costs: amazon already does this, with reserved instances. You give them a heads up about what you're going to need over the coming year, they'll give you a discount. If distributed, fail tolerant and instant deployable are three things that describe your startup, relying on your hardware to always work, that your sysop friend is always around and that you're on top of kernel bugs seems like a pretty fast way to fail. On the other hand, offload all this to a company who's doing it anyhow, and you might find that you get to extend your runway, grow with your customers (who says it is bad to deploy more servers based on customer orders??) and get to focus on more interesting things, such as where to find the next beer. :)
- fierarul 17y ago
  > If distributed, fail tolerant and instant deployable are three things that describe your startup, relying on your hardware to always work, that your sysop friend is always around and that you're on top of kernel bugs seems like a pretty fast way to fail. Indeed, if you are a typical startup, then you either don't have the capital, the time or the knowledge to manage your own hardware. But at some point you should move into a hardware-owner category at least because it's the foundation on whatever your are building and you might want some control over that.

wmf 17y ago

All his complaints about managing a "datacenter" also apply to colo.

imajes 17y ago

As a startup, owning hardware (or, sometimes, leasing) tends to eat up on your balance sheet really quickly as a cap ex (capital expenditure). You're immediately spending money and taking runway off the table and turning it into illiquid assets. So sure, raw hardware you own in a rack somewhere is probably cheaper over 18 months. But then you're still stuck with it after 18 months (whereas you can just swap out for a larger sized ec2 in the space of a few minutes, whenever you want, without penalty). Then again, unless you're buying a whole cage/closet you're probably paying the top whack fee anyhow, since data centers almost always deal with negotiating on the cage/closet level - anything smaller is typically not worth it to them. So you're paying full rate for your 2u box, and sitting on hardware that's depreciating. Plus, to get into the good datacenters, the ones that have provable disaster recovery, multi homed bandwidth, power and cooling , you will need to prove your creditworthiness and such. But that's OK - you'll stake all you got to get a couple cheap servers hosted somewhere that won't go down (and if it did, be trivial to heal) Finally: to the point about predictable usage lowering costs: amazon already does this, with reserved instances. You give them a heads up about what you're going to need over the coming year, they'll give you a discount. If distributed, fail tolerant and instant deployable are three things that describe your startup, relying on your hardware to always work, that your sysop friend is always around and that you're on top of kernel bugs seems like a pretty fast way to fail. On the other hand, offload all this to a company who's doing it anyhow, and you might find that you get to extend your runway, grow with your customers (who says it is bad to deploy more servers based on customer orders??) and get to focus on more interesting things, such as where to find the next beer. :)

fierarul 17y ago
> If distributed, fail tolerant and instant deployable are three things that describe your startup, relying on your hardware to always work, that your sysop friend is always around and that you're on top of kernel bugs seems like a pretty fast way to fail. Indeed, if you are a typical startup, then you either don't have the capital, the time or the knowledge to manage your own hardware. But at some point you should move into a hardware-owner category at least because it's the foundation on whatever your are building and you might want some control over that.