[toast0]

Bare metal is a continuum too. You don't have to pick between a full cloud deploy and building your own datacenter from scratch.

You can get bare metal servers from a host on monthly or hourly terms.

You can get a 1/3rd rack cabinet at a colo facility and bring your own router, and use the colo's IPs

You can get a cage or a room at a colo and arrange for connecticity to your various upstreams and peers with your own ASN and IPs.

Only after all this is exhausted would I move towards and owned and operated datacenter where all the pieces are under company control and responsibility. (Although, if you rely on it, you're responsible for it, regardless of if you actually control it)

[watsocd]

That is all true but then you need to pay for the services and equipment as well as have the expertise on staff to configure and manage the equipment.

As far as reliability, you can't compare almost any COLO location with an AWS data center.

[toast0]

If you're running bare metal on someone else's servers, you basically have the same staffing requirements as running on EC2. Just need people who understand real machines instead of virtual machines. You'll be paying the host instead of amazon for services and equipment. But the prices might be less.

There's no super secret reliability technology. You can absolutely compare colo with AWS. Many colos may be less reliable, and some may be more reliable. You need to look at power redundancy: how many utility feeds, what kind of ups, generators, testing schedules, what the points of failur are, how they responded in the past, etc. Same for networking feeds. Most colos have simpler networks than AWS which reduces the possible failures, but they may be less redundant etc; they probably have better bandwidth prices though.

Anyway, if you want a reliable system, you're going to need to be in multiple locations, and if you're in multiple locations, you should be able to weather the inevitable power relay failures and border router failures, etc every couple of years.

[ericd]

>As far as reliability, you can't compare almost any COLO location with an AWS data center.

Why not? We had much less downtime than AWS' NoVa DC while coloing, and I don't think our DC was exceptional. AWS is probably much more competent, but they're also trying to build something much more complex than your average small-scale colo setup.