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Comment by tom1337 | Hacker News Reader

But when you are Colocating you have higher upfront costs as you need to acquire hardware and also need to have somebody nearby the datacenter for hardware swaps in case of a failure, no?

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You need to buy the hardware. However, you don't really need a dude on-hand to swap stuff on a daily basis, unless you're trying to host backblaze. The approach we take (with our data center 1000 miles away) is to provision excess machines. So if we need 6 machines we'll provision, say 8. Failure modes are always assumed to be "the whole machine" -- so a machine is either in service or not. Over time (years) one or two machines might fail in one way or another. Every couple of years we mount a rescue mission to repair/replace the bad machines, do some upgrades etc. We have redundant switches and routers and would make a special trip to replace one of those if there were a failure. The entire deployment has a "scaled to zero" cloud hot standby in place for the eventuality that the whole setup gets nuked somehow.

There's higher upfront costs, but typically we find that we are breakeven for the cost of hardware in 12 months or less. In my experience, colos will have techs available for hardware swaps / remote hands troubleshooting if needed. It's not free for that but it solves that problem. I think it really just depends on your company's needs and skillset. For our company it makes sense to colocate. We are a VOIP service provider, so we also have multiple IP transit providers and our own /22 subnet. We use BGP to change / pull routes quickly when there's outages with an ISP or cloud provider. I know AWS supports a setup like that, but you're relying on them for announcing route changes.

There's tonnes of companies out there who have smart remote hands in the major cities who can respond in sub 1hour to an outage at your choosen DC.

Refurb servers will still blast AWS, and spares are easy to source.

I know HE.net does a rack for like $500/mo intro price and that comes with a 1G internet feed as well.

using decomissioned hardware saves you 90% of the costs and you usually colocate where you live or just have one of your tech friends help out :)

most datacenters do offer remote hands which is a bit pricey, but since they're only needed in emergencies in a redundant setup it is just not required.

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