A few years ago, I got a deal on a cabinet at a colo, and then when one of the research labs at USC dumped their servers for the cloud, and they gave me 17 serv

A few years ago, I got a deal on a cabinet at a colo, and then when one of the research labs at USC dumped their servers for the cloud, and they gave me 17 servers. I'd previously custom built a 32 core, 32 gig server just out of hacker interest, and between the USC servers and my previously owned hardware I put together a 196 core cluster with 3 redundant ( dev, staging, live ) environments for my own playground, and similar setups for hosting clients. Adding to and modifying the system for a few years, I had what would have cost $96K a month at AWS, but was only $600 a month to me.