> Dedicated/conventional servers: Burn 10 hours of sales and contract negotiation, vendor selection, etc., plus ~10-20h in anything specific to the vendor, and

> Dedicated/conventional servers: Burn 10 hours of sales and contract negotiation, vendor selection, etc., plus ~10-20h in anything specific to the vendor, and then set up systems. Get a bunch of dedicated boxes (coloing your own gear may be better at scale but 10-20x the time and then upfront cost...), Or just use a provider that you're already familiar with, at whatever list price they give you. This is fair since in option #2 you're assuming that we already know about Amazon, and won't stress about the 3x dedicated server cost. > set up single-site HA (hardware or software load balancer, A+B power, dual line cord servers for at least databases, etc. Many high-end providers will simply do this for you, and have setups ready on rack for you to use. It's not really that hard so long as you're not going past say... 15 boxes. For anything less than that, I can pretty much guarantee you'll find a high-end provider that will have you set up in 4-6 hours maximum.