The core of this article is that you get more performance for your money by building your own servers and racking them. I think we can all agree there. The pr

The core of this article is that you get more performance for your money by building your own servers and racking them. I think we can all agree there. The problem with "hardware is cheap and programmers are expensive" is that your hardware will fail when you least expect it and have programmers sitting idle. Hardware is cheap, so have someone else assemble it and rack it. If you don't need it up all of the time, this is a great way to get a lot of performance -- IO and memory in particular.