[erik_seaberg]

> costs were pretty stable by number of servers, and so favored using fewer, more powerful servers

Didn't this make each failure a bigger hit to your overall capacity? How much redundancy did you have? I used to work in adtech with colocated hardware, and it was old and failed a lot, but they had enough it didn't matter ("we're down 5/120 in Germany but we can swap them out while we're there next month").

[vidarh]

In that case it was ~60 servers, so losing any single server made little difference, but yes it of course needs to be a consideration if your number of servers is low enough.

It was also a fully virtualised setup that could also tie in rented dedicated servers or cloud instances via VPNs as needed. So where it made sense or if we had an urgent need, we had the ability to spin things up as needed.

E.g. we had racks in London, but rented servers at Hetzner in Germany (Hetzner got close to the cost of the colocated servers, though mostly because rack space in London is ridiculously expensive; it might actually have saved us money to put servers in their colo facilities in Germany, even with the cost of travel to/from them occasionally)

[lunchables]

This sounds like a great use case for AWS -- as cheap insurance. Just setup a VPC and VPN and if you have hardware fail just spin up an instance in AWS until you can replace your physical hardware. Pay $40/mo or so to keep the VPN active.