Facebook announced plans earlier this year to build a custom data center in Prineville, Oregon, and Twitter announced last week that it plans to build one near

Facebook announced plans earlier this year to build a custom data center in Prineville, Oregon, and Twitter announced last week that it plans to build one near Salt Lake City, Utah I was referring to breaking ground on your own datacenter, including managing the HVAC, security, power, backbone connections, insurance, and personnel. When you get to the point where that is more cost-effective than the cloud or a few racks in a colo, in my opinion, you're past the startup phase. What you mention could easily fit somewhere on my timeline, perhaps those couple of years when they see that they are steady at 20 EC2 instances and renting a cage at a colo edges out Amazon on price, if not on scalability.