4 ms·

Owning it is only part of the equation, think about hosting (you dont want to host your servers in your house on a DSL line), power usage (those bad boys will u

Owning it is only part of the equation, think about hosting (you dont want to host your servers in your house on a DSL line), power usage (those bad boys will use a lot more then your desktop PC), cooling (they tend to get warm), backup solutions (an extra server, tape-libraries etc), maintenance (your super servers will break down at times) etc. $60K a year is peanuts for most companies.

jbellis 17y ago
> hosting, power usage, cooling These are all the same thing, in the sense that they're all included by a colo provider, and even high-end colocation space will save you a ton over AWS. > backup solutions (an extra server, tape-libraries etc) Grandparent talked about server-level redundancy. > maintenance (your super servers will break down at times) 24h on-site service is a standard option on server-class hardware, and not all that expensive. > $60K a year is peanuts for most companies. It's peanuts for large companies, but they already have their own ops departments and won't shy away from the details of handling a little hardware. Smaller companies will be acutely aware that $60k/yr is a good fraction of the cost of hiring another developer (or marketer).
- tibbon 17y ago
  Server level redundancy isn't backup, just as RAID isn't backup. If there's a mistake, or software-caused data corruption then you still lose.
tibbon 17y ago
I'm facing this right now. I just bought 6 1U servers for almost nothing for one of the companies I work with, and now we have to figure out where to put them. We had a free 1U rack space before, but we're unsure if we'll be able to get 6U of space for free. If not, CoLo spots aren't all that cheap. Putting them in someone's house isn't an option and we don't have much money. Sure we had the money to buy the servers (some were $100/each used from another company that was switching to EC2)- but I don't have 100's/month for racking each of them nearby. We're a super-small company without much capital and zero investment right now. Totally bootstrapped and paying for stuff via consulting. There's no way in hell we have a 60K budget and if we bring in that much total in the next 9 months I'd be happy.
- patrickgzill 17y ago
  Go to webhostingtalk.com and look around. There are places that will host 1U for $50 each including bandwidth and remote reboot support.
  - tibbon 17y ago
    Thanks! I was talking to a friend that runs a small CoLo and it was looking like $200-400/month for each server, depending on options.

jbellis 17y ago

> hosting, power usage, cooling These are all the same thing, in the sense that they're all included by a colo provider, and even high-end colocation space will save you a ton over AWS. > backup solutions (an extra server, tape-libraries etc) Grandparent talked about server-level redundancy. > maintenance (your super servers will break down at times) 24h on-site service is a standard option on server-class hardware, and not all that expensive. > $60K a year is peanuts for most companies. It's peanuts for large companies, but they already have their own ops departments and won't shy away from the details of handling a little hardware. Smaller companies will be acutely aware that $60k/yr is a good fraction of the cost of hiring another developer (or marketer).

tibbon 17y ago
Server level redundancy isn't backup, just as RAID isn't backup. If there's a mistake, or software-caused data corruption then you still lose.

tibbon 17y ago

I'm facing this right now. I just bought 6 1U servers for almost nothing for one of the companies I work with, and now we have to figure out where to put them. We had a free 1U rack space before, but we're unsure if we'll be able to get 6U of space for free. If not, CoLo spots aren't all that cheap. Putting them in someone's house isn't an option and we don't have much money. Sure we had the money to buy the servers (some were $100/each used from another company that was switching to EC2)- but I don't have 100's/month for racking each of them nearby. We're a super-small company without much capital and zero investment right now. Totally bootstrapped and paying for stuff via consulting. There's no way in hell we have a 60K budget and if we bring in that much total in the next 9 months I'd be happy.

patrickgzill 17y ago
Go to webhostingtalk.com and look around. There are places that will host 1U for $50 each including bandwidth and remote reboot support.
- tibbon 17y ago
  Thanks! I was talking to a friend that runs a small CoLo and it was looking like $200-400/month for each server, depending on options.