For me it is worth it not to have to deal with it. For $529/mo I got: 2x Intel Xeon-Clovertown 5320L-QuadCore [1.86GHz] 4x Seagate Cheetah ST373455SS (10K

For me it is worth it not to have to deal with it. For $529/mo I got: 2x Intel Xeon-Clovertown 5320L-QuadCore [1.86GHz] 4x Seagate Cheetah ST373455SS (10K SCSI drives) Hardware RAID controller 16GB RAM 2TB transfer per month. 100Mbps uplink Peace of mind Sure I could get everything but that last item for less. There is an inflection point where it is more economical to run my own hardware again but I'm not there. For a few hundred more than cost when issues occur a competent support person is helping me within minutes. When (not if) there are issues with my servers, driving to a colo would eat my savings. When you have a hardware issue at softlayer they fix it. They don't have to wait for new hardware as they have a stock. I'd rather be spending my time coding and working on features. Having your own non-mission colo-ed box is awesome, but the cases where dedicated leasing or AWS doesn't make sense are fewer and fewer for bootstrapers. Note: userscripts.org is 3 years old. It ran on a colo-ed box for a year. Then a $200 serverbeach box. But it just outgrew that ( http://userscripts.org/articles/22-2008-overview http://userscripts.org/articles/22-2008-overview for 2008 review with stats )