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It's a classic lease vs. buy argument. If you only need a resource for a day, then relatively speaking, it's cheaper. However, if you pay the rental fee every

It's a classic lease vs. buy argument. If you only need a resource for a day, then relatively speaking, it's cheaper. However, if you pay the rental fee every day for a year, it gets more and more expensive than an outright purchase. The comparison largely depends on the time scale you look at. The main reasons I'm aware of that provisioning dedicated servers take longer is because you have to deal with data center logistics. Which rack does it go in? Which VLANs does it need to be in? What bandwidth is the customer paying for and how will we route the uplink? If the customer has other machines can we put these new ones in the same rack without overloading the PDU? There's a lot of hidden work that goes into data center management.

lsc 15y ago
>It's a classic lease vs. buy argument. Sorry, I guess i wasn't clear. I meant renting a dedicated server, which I thought was comparable in cost to 'the cloud' - buying, of course, is more expensive in the short term and cheaper in the long term. Personally, I think a /whole lot/ of the pain of owning (small amounts) of hardware is that most of the co-location vendors spend inordinate amounts of time trying to 'extract maximum value' (meaning, they fuck around on getting you a price, trying to get the max value you will accept.) I'm considering getting back in to the co-location business[1] in part because of this, and in part because it would let me scale to the point that it would help amortize out all the time I have to spend negotiating. Man, I just spent three hours today talking to the owner of my data center, and he /still/ didn't give me a price. "tell me what you get from the other guy" - I mean, he's a nice guy, and I didn't really mind hanging out with him, I probably even got a little bit of useful information, but three hours of two guys, both whom can probably bill out at $100+/hr, and we still didn't arrive on a price for an operation as small as mine? (approx. 150a of 120v power and accompanying rackspace; 5 cabnets or so. This didn't even include bandwidth.) [1]http://prgmr.com/colocation.html http://prgmr.com/colocation.html

lsc 15y ago

>It's a classic lease vs. buy argument. Sorry, I guess i wasn't clear. I meant renting a dedicated server, which I thought was comparable in cost to 'the cloud' - buying, of course, is more expensive in the short term and cheaper in the long term. Personally, I think a /whole lot/ of the pain of owning (small amounts) of hardware is that most of the co-location vendors spend inordinate amounts of time trying to 'extract maximum value' (meaning, they fuck around on getting you a price, trying to get the max value you will accept.) I'm considering getting back in to the co-location business[1] in part because of this, and in part because it would let me scale to the point that it would help amortize out all the time I have to spend negotiating. Man, I just spent three hours today talking to the owner of my data center, and he /still/ didn't give me a price. "tell me what you get from the other guy" - I mean, he's a nice guy, and I didn't really mind hanging out with him, I probably even got a little bit of useful information, but three hours of two guys, both whom can probably bill out at $100+/hr, and we still didn't arrive on a price for an operation as small as mine? (approx. 150a of 120v power and accompanying rackspace; 5 cabnets or so. This didn't even include bandwidth.) [1]http://prgmr.com/colocation.html http://prgmr.com/colocation.html