[dcoperator1]

The price for colocating in a Tier 2 datacenter close enough for me to walk to was $75/amp. Which is about the same cost as AWS.

You're really paying somewhere between the savings of putting a datacenter in Nowhere, Oregon and the cost to convince someone to live there.

[nine_k]

How can you directly compare $75 / amp to AWS? This very much depends on the kind if load you have.

Also, AWS's egress likely costs much more than the datacenter's; again, possible savings very much depend on the kind of load you have.

[wongarsu]

I'd agree that unless you can really profit from having very specific hardware, you're better off renting dedicated servers than colocating servers you own. Have somebody else worry about having people on call to switch out failed hard drives.

Comparing either to AWS will inevitably lead to a much more complex discussion about spot instances, traffic costs, ancillary services etc.