Exactly. These examples are mostly apples to oranges comparisons. I have worked over 20 years in OPS and it is really hard to do cheaper than AWS ____in the lon

Exactly. These examples are mostly apples to oranges comparisons. I have worked over 20 years in OPS and it is really hard to do cheaper than AWS ____in the long run___. If you are unlucky and bought a batch of SSDs that are faulty exactly 1 month after warranty expires or you have downtime because of other low-level reasons that AWS shields you from, your co-loc cost can quickly go up. I don't even want to go into networking hoops, that is a whole different problem to deal with global network vendors. If you can be sure you never run into these, or your business is resiliant to these sort of problems, or you have a dedicated highly skilled team (like dropbox) than co-loc might be a good idea. Otherwise it is pretty damn hard.