[Zachery]

Originally Posted by kerplunknet

I still will never understand why people waste money on dedicated servers. We have purchased about ten servers in the past and have had them co-located with Defender Hosting (.com) for the past three years. Never had any problems.

Our most recent server purchase:

Dual AMD Opteron 270, Dual Core
8 GB RAM
4x 74 GB 15,000 RPM ? RAID 10
Fedora Core 4 Linux, 64-bit


It's BLAZING fast.

Because the TCO of co-located servers are insane.

A post of mine from BBA about the TCO for one of my clients

The user I was talking with required less than 200gb of bandwidth a month, And thinking about it now I didn't take into account un-metered bandwidths (the throughput plans, but those are just as costly).

I must also say his arguments were vastly flawed due to the fact he didn't take into account the original build cost for a server, added into his monthly bills. However, my post is still valid.

Honestly? You can't.

However, lets assume that you do colo, and you need way more than 200gb of bandwidth (most of the sites I'm runnin go though 500-1500GB of bandwidth a month).

The cost of building servers to acomdiate the trafic would cost upwords of 1500 dollars, not to mention my time configuring, and setting up the initial install of the OS, not to mention any license fees if I were to use one distro over another.

Ontop of this, lets say that hardware fails, perhaps my entire scsi array and drives, now I have to replace it. Cost goes up.

I'm glad colo works well for you, but it doesn't for everyone.

I just priced the servers we rent now (most of them) Each would cost me
$3,454 from dell, x 6 = 20724 for intital setup. Now, this doesn't even start to cover the bandwidth charges that I(my clients) will need to pay for. I believe all of the servers go though a total of about 4TB a month, at least to be on the safe side. Thats another 4000 a month just for colocation.

So, we have 24724 dollars just to get our first month plus setup.

In the first year we spent 68,724 on colocation fees.

Compared to 1800~ a month on retal fees, which is 21000~.

So, ontop of this, if any of my hardware fails, I am responseable for it, which means more money directly out of my clients pockets, if the reneted hardware fails, its not our problem and replaced quickly.

Sure we could sell them, but I generally don't get rid of servers.

Edit: We go though upwards for 5TB a month atm, for all of the servers.