Author here. Co-location sounds nice, if you or one of your employees is always near the datacenter. This alone is reason enough for me not to consider it. For

Author here. Co-location sounds nice, if you or one of your employees is always near the datacenter. This alone is reason enough for me not to consider it. For $100 I could get a Xeon E3-1245 with 32GB ECC Ram, 2x 3TB HDs from Hetzner. One year later? Better system, same price. Upgrade costs? One to two days of work migrating. I believe co-location has its place but not if we are talking about "only" $100 and pretty simple needs. There is always a time factor that outweighs its gains. "Hostage situations" and incompetent personal is something, I believe, that is hard to compare. Everyone near your system, no matter what or where, can cause problems. What if they refuse to hand out your server till all payment problems are solved? Maybe this depends on the country but getting the server if they refuse to hand it out will likely consume more time than just paying whatever they want. Also if you planned for this situation with some EC2 instances just switching the domain over and settling the dispute should be doable.