We've done our own hosting for twelve years now; hundreds of physical servers in a co-lo. We do continuous deployment (have for basically ever) and multiple ide

We've done our own hosting for twelve years now; hundreds of physical servers in a co-lo. We do continuous deployment (have for basically ever) and multiple identical shards with horizontal balancing, so there's almost no "special" server that we can't afford to lose or upgrade. While our hardware and ops team and premise costs are a little lower than high volume EC2 to the same scale, the real win comes at the network. High quality transit through multiple redundant links, high capacity routers, our own BGP, is all much lower cost and more flexible than we can get from EC2. It's not even in the same ballpark! (Also, we out put SSDs into databases years before they were usable in EC2, so there was a win there, too!) Finally, we're hiring into our on prem team :-) https://IMVU.com/jobs https://IMVU.com/jobs