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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.