[that_guy_iain]

Honestly, 10 years is a long time for a server. I would be honestly surprised if a server lasted 10 years.

But I agree I also get the tone of "servers should be cattle and not pets, just kill them and build a new one". Which can also be done on bare metal if you're using vms/containers. It seems like most people forget these cloud servers need to run on bare metal.

[bcrosby95]

Really? We've colocated our servers for the past 18 or so years.

We have about 40. The oldest is around 17 years old. Our newest server is 9 years old. Our average server age is probably around 13 years old.

The most common failure that completely takes them out of commission is a popped capacitor on the motherboard. Never had it happen before the 10 year mark.

Never had memory failure. Have had disk failures, but those are easy to replace. Had one power supply failure, but it was a faulty batch and happened within 2 years of the server's life.

[that_guy_iain]

The last time I worked with a ~8 year old server, it used to go through hard drives at a rate of 1 every 2 months. While we could replace them easily and it was RAID so there wasn't any data loss, I personally would've got fed up of replacing HDDs every couple of months.

Also, most of my experience is with rented dedicated servers and they just give me a new one completely so I never really see if they're fully scrapped.

[bcrosby95]

We haven't had any hardware failures - hard drive or otherwise - in the last 5 months.