[ben_pr]

I'm a little shocked at this decision. The issues faced are all solved problems from PB storage to HA on server clusters even across Data centers. Good solutions do have upfront costs but the math that cloud hosting is 5-10X more than co-location company owned/leased is still in the ball park. It sounds like they may need an architect with enterprise experience to help them out rather than random comments on HN.

[djsumdog]

Yea, every growing company I've been at has been in the process of moving off of hosted solutions and onto their own hardware to cut costs.

Two such companies made the mistake of doing that with OpenStack, which is terrible and should die in a fire.

But one later switched to DC/OS and containers and it has worked really well. They've been migrating apps running on EC2 instances into docker containers than can run on marathon in our local data center and the savings is pretty substantial (even adding in the cost of the teams needed to maintain our own platforms).

Managed solutions are great for startups. There is a lot of value in not having to setup, maintain and manager your own hardware .. but that does reach a limit and companies need to be prepared for that transition and avoid lockins.