After paying to colocate an old rack server and paying exorbitant amounts as a student, I now enjoy using pay-for-what-you-use AWS and GCP services. A colo box

After paying to colocate an old rack server and paying exorbitant amounts as a student, I now enjoy using pay-for-what-you-use AWS and GCP services. A colo box can be great if you can amortize the cost among a dozen friends. Otherwise, I think your money goes much farther on AWS and GCP, especially if you know some basic cost saving techniques like reserved instances or not using instances at all (Lambda, Fargate, S3 and other on-demand services/their Google equivalents can cover a lot of needs nowadays).