> Has anyone done this and what was your experience? I have 2x 2u in two different datacentres in the UK. Connected together via IPSEC using pfSense. 4u is co

> Has anyone done this and what was your experience? I have 2x 2u in two different datacentres in the UK. Connected together via IPSEC using pfSense. 4u is common, and a rack would be nice. Your costs will come based on racking units, bandwidth and transit/connection speeds. 1Gbit is going to be more than 100mbit but you can normally negoiate this. Hardware costs are up-front but when the server is humming, they last for a good period of time. You don't normally gain DDoS protection so if you require it, factor that in. > How do you select a colo and what do you look for? Choose whether you would like: Commercial (Cogent, Peer1, Rackspace) who own actual buildings and run as an datacentre as a datacentre. Try to provide the greatest, hand you an account manager and the ability to ticket the DCop monkeys. Or, independent who own industial units called datacentres. Who tend to over decent internet feeds and hold more of a independent feel. However they may lack the 24/7 support you may need. Or enterprise features that you may find within commercial. In terms of selection I recommend taking a look on WebHostingTalk.com under their colocation section. Google yeilds good results. Find a provider, get in contact and take a tour of the DC and see how it feels. > How do you manage the hardware and how much savings in time/$ is there really? My servers are all second hand eBay purchases and have had a lot of TLC to get up to scrap. Once tamed, they purr. The amount of work on them is near to none. Create a new VM, Update OS; general SysAdmin stuff. I would recommend that if your looking for sanity: buy new. eBay servers are hit/miss and you never know what condition they will arrive in. iLO/LOM is configured so I always have remote management unless the DC goes dark. Servers are resillent too, I have one server which has two ram sticks failling, but still operating with no issues. Network issues can arise and you have to ensure it's not you causing the mishap before you can get actual help. You most likely won't get DDoS protection on independent-owned but is a growing trend so you may get lucky. I moved from VPS to colocation and refuse to use the cloud. The cloud has its purposes but for me, I'd rather bare metal and hypervisors. Paying another company to host my information where I may not even have full control. Just doesn't settle with me if I am to provide client services. Plus, I can actually own the internet space these servers sit upon. No restrictions with what services I desire. My OS is FreeBSD hosting virtual machines with bHyve within a jail. I will always advocate for colocation. FreeBSD 11 5:09PM up 791 days, 18:17, 8 users, load averages: 0.66, 0.82, 0.88 FreeBSD 12 5:11PM up 174 days, 21:19, 2 users, load averages: 0.59, 0.68, 0.70 5:12PM up 174 days, 20:03, 1 user, load averages: 0.12, 0.11, 0.09