[abc123xyz]

cost! Cost!! COST!!!

I collocate 5x 4u servers with 24 and 36 drive bays, 128GB ram, SSD drives squished in for OS, for a total (multiple raid 5 volumes for each 6 disks) usable space for my project of 375 TB

Power and 2-3gbit of bandwidth is included, as well as remote hands to check up on server (for example IPMI sometimes does not work) or replace drives (pay extra for enterprise grade drives would save you alot of hassle in long term!)

for .... €1500 / month

now go and calculate the cost of that on AWS

[davb]

I absolutely agree in the long term, but can you say a little about how much those servers cost initially?

I tend to favour dedicated servers which I own over VPS but for small businesses with extremely constrained budgets ("prove we can make money before we invest in hardware") and startups, flexible virtual servers can be a great way to ramp up in the beginning.

[abc123xyz]

About $10,000 per server, equipment (very heavy) was shipped from US so there were import duties but it worked out a little bit cheaper than buying in EU in end, and had other reasons to shop in US.

Anyway its a once off cost, that accountant can do all sorts of magic with this.

Ive been in business for 7 years and hope to remain around for as long.

Have already saved money as to compared to renting dedicated servers before. AWS etc were never an option the sums simply never work out.

AWS might be great at first when you are starting out, but the costs can cripple a business, especially if you dont have others peoples venture capital to burn.

edit: when bandwidth costs are factored in the difference is and order of magnitude between my current setup and amazon, at time of this post using 2200 mbit outgoing, 800 incoming

edit2: my only regrets is not collocating earlier, have spent well into upper 6 figures over all the years :( on renting, AWS etc werent around when was starting off either.

[blibble]

that long term can be pretty quick though... in the UK at least you get 100% tax relief for plant (hardware) expenditure up to a limit (currently half a million a year)

you get no tax relief for opex.

[vacri]

400TB s3 storage in US-East is ~US$11800, so it's about 6 times the cost. You also get power and remote hands. Bandwidth isn't free, though, and can get pricey. On the other hand, for data you can shift to Glacier, you only pay a third of that cost. On the other, other hand, if you're using this amount of gear, you may be able to talk to an account manager and get something else sorted out. You'll probably want to throw some VMs in there with S3, of course, so that adds to the cost... 122GB ram reserved instance VMs run to about $700/mo, so with five of those you're looking at about US$15k + bandwidth, though of course you're not paying for the hardware or hardware setup time.