[brongondwana]

We run into this at FastMail all the time as well. For the one customer who needed "their own gear" we built out on SoftLayer for much the same reasons as the article - real hardware where you need it.

But our operations costs are so much lower than renting that we could replace all our hardware every year and still break even.

(yeah, we could get SoftLayer to refresh our hardware every year as well, but we don't need it refreshed that fast, and at the end we still own the hardware)