[detournement]

I am so glad I live in a world where I will never have to do this again for anything but large infrastructure projects. I've colocated servers at major POPs like 111 8th Avenue in Manhattan, Equinix in Seacaucus, One Wilshire in LA.

For smaller projects, the convenience of the cloud is absolutely worth the price. For a larger build - like over 10k a month in infrastructure cost the cloud starts to make less sense economically but 'colocating your first server' is not a right of passage anymore - its unnecessary and a huge waste of time.

All of the functionality/services you have to provision yourself in colo like - redundancy, backup, remote hands, environmental monitoring, hardware maintenance are just not worth figuring out until there is substantial cost savings to realize.

[pmoriarty]

I like to keep control of my data and manage my own systems, instead of using some black box where I'm at the mercy of a cloud provider.

You're not going to be able to troubleshoot or optimize down to the hardware level in the cloud. If some cloud service doesn't work or is not available, all you can really do is wait and hope they get it working again, while if you manage your own systems you might have a chance of fixing it or at least finding out what happened and work to prevent it from happening again. Some applications just won't work on the cloud or exhibit mysterious bugs, failures, or bizarre behavior.

Security and data ownership is pretty much out of your hands when your servers are in the cloud. You can only hope and pray your cloud provider is doing a good at securing your data and isn't stealing or selling it themselves. You generally have zero visibility in to how security is handled by your cloud provider or whether a security compromise has taken place.

And then there's the issue of vendor lock-in, which becomes more and more likely the more unique cloud features you use.

Of course, for maximum control, you wouldn't rely on a colo either, and just host your servers in your own server room(s).

[hosay123]

> redundancy, backup, remote hands, environmental monitoring, hardware maintenance are just not worth figuring out until there is substantial cost savings to realize.

So you don't need to monitor temperature sensors any more with a VM, but most of the above are still costs with cloud - flaky RAM, redundancy, backups, monitoring, etc. There are also the things you previously didn't have to worry about - crappy resource isolation turning your scratch disks into 2kb/sec joys, total ineffectiveness of the CPU cache, managing a now-essential network fabric to tie pieces of your app together where previously it all fit on 2 master/slave machines, etc.

Of course if your application isn't simply some stock PHP/MySQL application, and you want to really "embrace cloud", then the time you saved fighting a subset of hardware problems is replaced by a fixed development cost integrating with someone else's higher tier APIs (S3, Dynamo, etc) you can then never escape even if you wanted to.

I've never seen any realistic numbers comparing the use of traditional hosting facilities, say, providing managed servers, to the new generation VM stuff. Any material I've seen has been sponsored crap involving some multinational.

My own experience is similar to yours - hosting your own hardware is a pain in the ass. However there is middle ground, there are many colos that will happily provide managed hardware, and perf/pence, this still tends to be far cheaper than the equivalent in VMs, and increasingly they're coming with similar APIs to order/replace machines

[IgorPartola]

From my limited experience, the cloud is always more expensive if you know your exact usage requirements. If, for example, you know that six octo-core 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD-in-RAID1 servers would fit your needs from now until 10 years from now, you will do better to just rent them from SoftLayer, Hetzner, etc.

However, if you anticipate growth, or need to be able to spin up a test server, then shut it down a day later, etc. then you are better off paying premium for the cloud. Sure, there are economies of scale at play here: AWS has so many servers, they are not paying a person to log into every one of them every so often to run updates, etc. However, make no mistake: everything you would have to do with a server, Amazon has to do too. In fact, they have to do much more to keep all of them running at once. That cost will be passed onto you.

Even with all of that, it's cheaper if you want to be able to spin something up, then shut it down. Another great example is the additional services provided by the likes of AWS: you can get things like load balancers, cache servers, database servers, orchestration services, etc. You can do all of this yourself, but at some point it's cheaper to just pay for something like ELB than to learn how to do it yourself and spend the hours to set it up. Human time is more expensive than that.

Lastly, if you just need a really small machine, there is no beating the cloud. You simply cannot get a dedicated machine for $5/month, and you likely never will.

[maaarghk]

You can get damn close!

http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/

I found OVH's dedicated server offerings to be so cheap that there was no point in using shared hardware for the flexibility. Then again, I'm not running my entire business on these boxes... but I don't think I'd have a major issue if I wanted to!

[yellowapple]

Huh; that's actually a better deal in many cases than my existing virtual servers. Thanks for that recommendation; I'll keep my eye on that.

[maaarghk]

The day I got my first ovh recommendation was a good day for my inner accountant.

[Alupis]

I actually find colo'ing a new server quite fun and enjoyable... even after doing it a half dozen times... as a techy... something is just so cool about putting a server in the same racks as some monster equipment. ;-P

However, I disagree about colo'ing not being economical. If you setup a physical box in a colo with a hypervisor (kvm, xen), then the density you can get out of 1U is amazing, and makes the entire thing much more affordable.

Take this site for example: https://www.ubiquityhosting.com/cloud

16GB ram, 8 coers for $128 a month. Considering most 2U colo spots I've seen hover around $150 a month, seems like the colo is not a good deal. However, the VPS for $128 a month is a single server. Your $150 a month colo, with xen, you can pack 3-7 vm's in the same space, making the cost-per-(virtual)server much lower.

[larrys]

"I actually find colo'ing a new server quite fun and enjoyable... even after doing it a half dozen times... as a techy... something is just so cool about putting a server in the same racks as some monster equipment."

Agree. If there was a question on some test that said "I find colo'ing a new server quite fun and enjoyable" I would give that a 9 or 10 for sure. Have always loved the sound of the machine room. (This dates back to the days of the computer center at school with the tape drives and Dec terminals.)

[druiid]

Mostly agree, although in this case I say mostly because the colo facilities where you can easily rent a single unit of space are far and few between these days. If we were still in an environment where there were tons of hosts like Verio still around, I'd say there's nothing wrong with coloing a single box.

For sure once you reach above the $10k/month level there's a very good chance that it will make sense to colo. You can fit a LOT of hardware in a single full rack, and they're like $750/month plus bandwidth and power costs (so around $1200-1700 all said and done per month).

[Alupis]

In good 'ol California bay area, you can get a full cabinet with un-metered 100Mbps port + 20A power for $600 a month.

Hurricane Electric data center in Fremont, CA, always has specials running.