Interesting write-up, but I expect you will have some problems over time with this. In my experience the computer failures are relatively easy to manage. Power

Interesting write-up, but I expect you will have some problems over time with this. In my experience the computer failures are relatively easy to manage. Power will be your primary issue, and to a lesser degree, internet. When we ran a lot of servers on UPSs, the UPSs start to become a major pain. UPSs fail much more often than hard-drives. And when the battery dies it cuts off power to the computer. You're using low-end desktop machines, so you probably don't have dual PSUs in each machine (if you did you could run each PSU to a different UPS). UPSs are also much more likely to fail when the grid power fails. So the power goes out, your UPSs will kick in, then 30 seconds later one or TWO fail. Can your power distribution can handle that? I'm no UPS expert, but this seemed pretty common across a variety of UPS products. As for internet, multiple links is a good start. Load-balancing outbound traffic is fairly straight-forward. Inbound traffic is much harder. Really you need BGP. A BGP-based set of links isn't cheap, and doing the configuration yourself is hard if you don't have experience with it. The alternatives that aren't IP routing based are usually based on DNS, which is better than nothing. But the effectiveness of it is dependent on how your users servers/clients/browsers implement DNS caching. It will work OK for some users but some will cache the stale link IP for 24 hours -- not cool. You certainly can work this way, and probably get three nines of uptime. But I can say now that we switched to a decent colo I sleep a lot better. We can focus more on building product, adding value for our customers, than screwing around with the utilities. FWIW I'm basing this off of my experience in the United States.