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We have around 20 servers in a colo center down the street. At this number of servers we can still host websites that have millions of users (but not tens of m

We have around 20 servers in a colo center down the street. At this number of servers we can still host websites that have millions of users (but not tens of millions). They are not exotic servers either. In fact by now they are, on average, around 11 years old. And costed anywhere from 2k to 8k at the time of purchase. Some are as old as 19 years. Hell, when we bought some of them - with 32GB of memory each - AWS had no concept of "high memory" instances and you had to completely pay out your ass for a 32GB server, despite ram being fairly cheap at the time. We have no dedicated hardware person. Between myself and the CTO, we average maybe a day per month thinking about or managing the hardware. If we need something special setup that we have no experience in, we have a person we know that we contract, and he walks us through how and why he set it up as he did. We've used him twice in the last 13 years. The last time one of us had to visit the colocation center was months ago. The last time one of us had to go there in an emergency was years ago. It's a 5 minute drive from each of our homes. So, why exactly should we use the cloud? We have servers we already paid for. We rent 3 cabinets - I don't recall the exact cost, but I think its around $1k per month. We spend practically no time managing them. In our time being hosted in a colo center - the past 19 years - we've had a total of 3 outages that were the fault of our colo center. They all lasted on the order of minutes.

dahfizz 7y ago
I think people who have no experience managing servers dramatically overestimate how much time it takes to manage servers. Depending on your team, it can definitely be easier to manage your own hardware than to manage your cloud infrastructure.
- lykr0n 7y ago
  Yep. A lot of issues come from legacy products and configurations. You can do a greenfield infrastructure with OpenStack, VMware, or oVirt/RHEV and it's a pleasure to work with.
- wooly_bully 7y ago
  In my experience, it's not the time required but that a lot of development teams don't have a sysadmin or ops skillset.
  - sergiotapia 7y ago
    This is accurate in my experience. Also keeping things up and being there in case shit hits the fan is a full-time job. You can't write features and also manage servers equally well. Unless you have no life I guess.
    - wpietri 7y ago
      Totally. I've had personal colo'd servers for 20 years at this point. But I'm tired of knowing that at any point I might have to wake up and haul my ass down to San Jose to swear at some piece of failing gear. I'm excitedly moving it all into the cloud.
      - mcny 7y ago
        How far are you from you collocation? Is moving that closer an option?
        wpietri 7y ago
        Colocation in SF proper is very spendy, which is how we ended up in San Jose. But waking up to go anywhere at 3 am to swear at gear is no longer on my list of fun activities. And there's no colo that will move the gear along with me when I go on vacation.
        speleding 7y ago
        > there's no colo that will move the gear along with me when I go on vacation This is actually the main one for me. I've managed our own servers for a decade with almost zero downtime, and very little time spent at the colo. But you cannot safely go out of town without having someone else around who is familiar enough with your setup to deal with an outage. So moving stuff to AWS now almost entirely for that reason.
- foobiekr 7y ago
  There has also been an incredible propaganda campaign by the cloud providers to make this seem incredibly hard.
  - dazzawazza 7y ago
    Agreed, it's just become part of the group think of our times.
  - doublerabbit 7y ago
    The only hard part is finding a provider who won't screw you over. But then again this is the same as if you are to buy a car. You buy rack space, they give you a network cable and IP details. You configure the OS with that IP and your online.
- user5994461 7y ago
  Counterpoint: The OP is saying they spend 1 day a month managing servers. It's ridiculously little. The servers might as well be unmanaged. That's not enough time to keep OS or software up to date, or to monitor hardware usage, or to replace failing hardware and deal with spare parts.
  - dahfizz 7y ago
    This is just not true. A properly set up system requires very little manual work. Updated, monitoring, and alerting are all automated. I help manage ~50 on prem servers plus NAS, switches, etc. Over the past three years, I have had to replace one hard drive and one power supply. And neither of those brought anything down because of redundancy. We get alerts when something goes wrong, but that is a rare occurrence. This is my original point: servers won't just explode the minute you look away. It is not a full time job to "manage" them, unless you are at a real datacenter scale where a 1/1000 event happens twice a day. You set them up and then they continue to do what they do for a very long time.
- upcode 7y ago
  Do you have any resources you could link that go through buying and setting up servers?
- pickle-wizard 7y ago
  We have about 170 servers in a colo about 30 minutes from my home. I can go months without going to the colo. Usually when I go out there it is to replace a disk. We have a bunch of hardware coming up on end of life. I looked at moving us to cloud. The new hardware will cost about what 3 years of AWS would cost. Considering that the hardware I am replacing is over 6 years old, we are better off sticking with on-prem.

dahfizz 7y ago

I think people who have no experience managing servers dramatically overestimate how much time it takes to manage servers. Depending on your team, it can definitely be easier to manage your own hardware than to manage your cloud infrastructure.

lykr0n 7y ago
Yep. A lot of issues come from legacy products and configurations. You can do a greenfield infrastructure with OpenStack, VMware, or oVirt/RHEV and it's a pleasure to work with.
wooly_bully 7y ago
In my experience, it's not the time required but that a lot of development teams don't have a sysadmin or ops skillset.
- sergiotapia 7y ago
  This is accurate in my experience. Also keeping things up and being there in case shit hits the fan is a full-time job. You can't write features and also manage servers equally well. Unless you have no life I guess.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    Totally. I've had personal colo'd servers for 20 years at this point. But I'm tired of knowing that at any point I might have to wake up and haul my ass down to San Jose to swear at some piece of failing gear. I'm excitedly moving it all into the cloud.
    - mcny 7y ago
      How far are you from you collocation? Is moving that closer an option?
      - wpietri 7y ago
        Colocation in SF proper is very spendy, which is how we ended up in San Jose. But waking up to go anywhere at 3 am to swear at gear is no longer on my list of fun activities. And there's no colo that will move the gear along with me when I go on vacation.
        speleding 7y ago
        > there's no colo that will move the gear along with me when I go on vacation This is actually the main one for me. I've managed our own servers for a decade with almost zero downtime, and very little time spent at the colo. But you cannot safely go out of town without having someone else around who is familiar enough with your setup to deal with an outage. So moving stuff to AWS now almost entirely for that reason.
foobiekr 7y ago
There has also been an incredible propaganda campaign by the cloud providers to make this seem incredibly hard.
- dazzawazza 7y ago
  Agreed, it's just become part of the group think of our times.
- doublerabbit 7y ago
  The only hard part is finding a provider who won't screw you over. But then again this is the same as if you are to buy a car. You buy rack space, they give you a network cable and IP details. You configure the OS with that IP and your online.
user5994461 7y ago
Counterpoint: The OP is saying they spend 1 day a month managing servers. It's ridiculously little. The servers might as well be unmanaged. That's not enough time to keep OS or software up to date, or to monitor hardware usage, or to replace failing hardware and deal with spare parts.
- dahfizz 7y ago
  This is just not true. A properly set up system requires very little manual work. Updated, monitoring, and alerting are all automated. I help manage ~50 on prem servers plus NAS, switches, etc. Over the past three years, I have had to replace one hard drive and one power supply. And neither of those brought anything down because of redundancy. We get alerts when something goes wrong, but that is a rare occurrence. This is my original point: servers won't just explode the minute you look away. It is not a full time job to "manage" them, unless you are at a real datacenter scale where a 1/1000 event happens twice a day. You set them up and then they continue to do what they do for a very long time.
upcode 7y ago
Do you have any resources you could link that go through buying and setting up servers?
pickle-wizard 7y ago
We have about 170 servers in a colo about 30 minutes from my home. I can go months without going to the colo. Usually when I go out there it is to replace a disk. We have a bunch of hardware coming up on end of life. I looked at moving us to cloud. The new hardware will cost about what 3 years of AWS would cost. Considering that the hardware I am replacing is over 6 years old, we are better off sticking with on-prem.