[wannacboatmovie]

Yes, building your own shit is expensive.

Tale as old as time.

Before someone uses Google's servers as an example, I would say that strapping together consumer grade components with zip ties and no case isn't what I'd consider a 'server'; rather, a loose collection of parts.

[hinkley]

Google has 3 orders of magnitude more servers than I’ll ever need. With that sort of difference it’s not only a change of solution but also a change of rules.

We simply do not witness the same bottlenecks.

[lesuorac]

IIRC, parts for some of the garage servers were found from literally dumpster diving.

However, it does cause you to write some very fault tolerant code.