[fennecfoxen]

> The part that’s always missing with these rent vs buy analyses on HN for some reason is that it’s totally ignoring the opex cost of operating your own hardware which is going to be non 0.

Effectively hiring, retaining, evaluating and rewarding competent staff is hard. Even at a big company the datacenter can be a really small world, which makes it hard for your best employees to grow. Things are especially hard when you don't have a tech brand to rely on for your recruiting, and the staff's expertise is far outside the company's core business, making it harder to evaluate who's good at anything.