4 ms·

It probably comes down to how much money you have to buy servers (or rent ones) up front versus smaller cost increments for "utility" computing (can we stop cal

• lsc 17y ago
  it also depends on how much hardware and co-lo knowledge you have. Usually it makes sense to go virtual until you need more than 8 or 16 gigs of ram/ 4 cores. after that, it usually makes sense to buy hardware. If you need a 32GiB ram/8 core box, and you rent, you usually end up paying 1/3rd to 1/5th the hardware cost every month, depending on how much you pay for hardware, which is something else that varies wildly. What you pay to co-lo a server, and what you pay for bandwidth also varies quite a lot. The important thing is to make sure you aren't locked in to one vendor. There is a lot of room for price competition in the server-outsourcing market, and you don't get any benefit from that if you let yourself become locked in to one vendor.