[didibus]

How much would you charge to buy this machine, rent a space to put it in, pay for the utilities and rent related to it, set it up, and consequently maintain it for half a decade? In addition to the principal of purchasing the hardware?

[vbezhenar]

Not a lot. Installing Linux is trivial. Server hardware rarely breaks outside of disks which are trivial to replace as well.

[tatersolid]

In the real world: UPS,generators, cooling, BIOS/management card patching, 100 gigabit switches, optics, cabling, monitoring, tamper-proof logging, SEIM, cameras, physical security, software licenses. Plus maintenance on all that stuff.

Oh and you need a DR site too, so double it.

And staff up 4x for 24x7 operations and build an orchestration layer yourself.

I’ve done the math in a lot of scenarios, including (especially) staff time. Running your own real data center doesn’t make long-term financial sense unless you are in the mid-hundreds of physical servers.

Colo might make a bit more sense for some situations, but there’s a reason so much is being moved to cloud providers. The people doing it aren’t stupid.