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I spent some time trying to put together some numbers. From the research it looks like cost pressure against traditional colocation options has forced the prici

I spent some time trying to put together some numbers. From the research it looks like cost pressure against traditional colocation options has forced the pricing to come down. It still looks like owning your own hardware is a viable, and if you have people, good option.

mtw 15y ago
owning your own hardware is distraction, unless you've become too big or your business involves hosting (such as wordpress business model)
- ssmoot 15y ago
  Distraction to whom? The developers (everyone) in a two-person startup? Sure. In a mature business with 50 employees? In an organization of that size do you really want your development team driving IT decisions (and budget)?
  - mtw 15y ago
    as demonstrated by the frequent data center outages, it's extremely difficult to have 100% uptime, unless you have a crack team of sys admin and operators who are better than Google or Amazon engineers in server management and data center management. Investing in hardware means investing precious time, engineering talent in issues you can invest otherwise in sales, marketing, product design or any critical aspect of your business. Of course, if you find that hosting takes a large % of your costs, and if you are sure you can do it yourself with less costs , then it's time to have your own hardware.
    - ssmoot 15y ago
      You're over-simplifying. Amazon provides power, servers, bandwidth and their network. You still need administrators and ops people. If you colo, your data-center will provide power and bandwidth. You just need your cabinet network and the servers. On top of that, Amazon costs more, and expose you to problems like the EBS outage that you simply don't have with colocation because you haven't gone and developed a (probably necessarily) complex provisioning system to manage it all. The implication in your statements is clear that the act of purchasing, provisioning and maintaining hardware is a primary driver of your IT/Operations work-load, when in reality that's a minority concern at best for most. It borders on misinformation.
      - mtw 15y ago
        network or electricity or software will go down one day and then you will begin to think about disaster recovery plans and get another colocated space in easter or western US. A simpler option is to rent dedicated servers in 2 different hosting companies, say softlayer (US) and OVH (France) and design fall-back mechanism. It will cost you less than amazon or owning your own hardware.

mtw 15y ago

owning your own hardware is distraction, unless you've become too big or your business involves hosting (such as wordpress business model)

ssmoot 15y ago
Distraction to whom? The developers (everyone) in a two-person startup? Sure. In a mature business with 50 employees? In an organization of that size do you really want your development team driving IT decisions (and budget)?
- mtw 15y ago
  as demonstrated by the frequent data center outages, it's extremely difficult to have 100% uptime, unless you have a crack team of sys admin and operators who are better than Google or Amazon engineers in server management and data center management. Investing in hardware means investing precious time, engineering talent in issues you can invest otherwise in sales, marketing, product design or any critical aspect of your business. Of course, if you find that hosting takes a large % of your costs, and if you are sure you can do it yourself with less costs , then it's time to have your own hardware.
  - ssmoot 15y ago
    You're over-simplifying. Amazon provides power, servers, bandwidth and their network. You still need administrators and ops people. If you colo, your data-center will provide power and bandwidth. You just need your cabinet network and the servers. On top of that, Amazon costs more, and expose you to problems like the EBS outage that you simply don't have with colocation because you haven't gone and developed a (probably necessarily) complex provisioning system to manage it all. The implication in your statements is clear that the act of purchasing, provisioning and maintaining hardware is a primary driver of your IT/Operations work-load, when in reality that's a minority concern at best for most. It borders on misinformation.
    - mtw 15y ago
      network or electricity or software will go down one day and then you will begin to think about disaster recovery plans and get another colocated space in easter or western US. A simpler option is to rent dedicated servers in 2 different hosting companies, say softlayer (US) and OVH (France) and design fall-back mechanism. It will cost you less than amazon or owning your own hardware.