Colo is great if you do enough work to justify the cost. Most of the cloud free-tiers and low-end machines are far cheaper if you are just doing one-offs and sh

Colo is great if you do enough work to justify the cost. Most of the cloud free-tiers and low-end machines are far cheaper if you are just doing one-offs and short-term development work on projects. I've found that using the cloud forces me to be more responsible about having scripted operations procedures - which is great when clients come back after 5 months wanting minor changes - I can spin up a prod/dev server for their project with almost no overhead, and it wasn't cluttering up a colo server somewhere. Nonetheless, if performance/cost ratio is a definite concern, colo is definitely the right decision.