[Stem0037]

While colocation offers greater control and potentially lower costs for high-performance needs, it's worth noting that for many small to medium-sized operations, cloud services can still be more cost-effective when factoring in the total cost of ownership (TCO). This includes not just hardware costs, but also the time and expertise required for maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting.

Another one of the primary advantages of cloud services is the ease of scaling. In a colocation environment, scaling up often means purchasing new hardware and physically installing it. How do you address the scalability needs of rapidly growing applications or services in a colocation setup?

[altairprime]

While that may be true, it's not relevant in the context of the article. As the final paragraphs indicate, this is about telling people that datacenters exist at all (yes, people don't realize this!) and allow anyone to sign up and host stuff:

> If this is old hat to you, great! It means you're probably a grizzled 1990s sysadmin just like me, consarn it! This isn't for you, then.

> This is for the newer folks who might not have realized that there's an alternative to paying tribute to one of the three churches of the Clown: M, G, or A. If you want to "get your stuff online", there are other ways... and there always have been!

If you don't realize that self-service and managed-tier datacenters exist, you can't properly investigate, calculate, and compare TCO — and certainly the cloud providers aren't going to bring up datacenters unless they have to.

[sethammons]

SendGrid ran our own data centers and scaled massively. Yes, orders to dell took forever and we were often worried if we were going to have enough compute. It worked out to be vastly cheaper than aws but we still moved load into their cloud to help new projects spin up and burst activity. And moving over to managed services eventually became our default, not because it was monetarily cheaper, but because it let teams develop faster.

[phamilton]

I'd add that cloud services are dramatically cheaper when your application is able to tolerate preemption. Spot pricing in AWS is around $0.015/vcpu/hr.

That still going to be more expensive than a dedicated server, but it's much closer. If you have cyclical traffic patterns and other elastic workloads, the gap can be almost non-existent, even without considering personnel.