I've been tempted by VPS solutions, but no matter how I slice it colo hosting comes out cheaper:<p>- You can pick up a refurbished 1u server for $100-$150, for example from geeks.com . That'll get you an older processor, but often 4GB of RAM. Whatever you get will be significantly more powerful than low end VPS's, equivalent to a high-end VPS.<p>- We're hosting at a facility with excellent connectivity but little technical support. We pay ~$60 per month all in.<p>So for $200 upfront and $60/month we get the equivalent of a linode 4096, which would cost $160/month.<p>- We have a similar setup at another data center from another colo provider with semi-hot fail-over, providing both backup and BCP.<p>I can't figure out why people would go for high-end VPS instead of buying their own hardware and hosting. Is there a hidden benefit I'm missing?
Rolling your own will always be cheaper when all you compare are the costs of hardware and hosting costs. It also tends to be a huge time-suck and a big pain in the ass. What is your time worth? I rolled my own for years too, and then I realized I was twiddling with servers rather than building better software. That made it a very easy reason to switch.
I agree it is cheaper (I have a full cabinet of hardware co-located myself), but at the expense of being on call 24x7x365. Although hardware is generally reliable, it can and does fail. Do you want to be the guy dealing with the burned out power supply at 3AM?
All my company's servers are dedicated rental, we have a deal with a provider that effectively gives us colo costs without paying the upfront server costs.<p>But for my personal use, there a few reasons I like VPS options:<p>- Flexibility: rarely does a month go by where I don't shut down at least one server and add at least one server, plus various resizes<p>- Locations: my five current VPS servers are split over three data centres in two continents, without any of the hassle of making three seperate arrangements for colocation<p>- Price: High-end VPSs offer worse value for money than the cheaper options, and for server testing/developement it's handy to be able to pay ~$20/month for a low-end option<p>- Control Panels: It's surprisingly nice to be able to re-install the OS in a couple of minutes with a single click, to have a simple web GUI to control backups (and for that matter, the option to automatically backup the entire server regularly), it's not something I'd need for most servers, but for testing stuff out where I'm regularly re-installing it is very nice (I've got my server deployment down to a 600line bash script, so any time I want to try something new I re-install the OS, run my script, and in 5 minutes I've got my ideal server ready to go)
If you can avoid colo I would. It's such a pain in the ass to remotely troubleshoot the servers when that one thing does go wrong with the hardware. I blogged about it here:<p><a href="http://teabuzzed.com/2009/08/the-number-one-reason-my-startup-failed/" rel="nofollow">http://teabuzzed.com/2009/08/the-number-one-reason-my-startu...</a><p>For the power I needed and what I could afford colo was the only way to go but it definitely came with a price...<p>If/when you're big enough colo probably makes more sense but in the beginning VPS is definitely the way to go.
Can anyone point me to some good resources/guides for Colo information? I am trying to get a better grasp of the pros/cons, etc. Sites or individual articles would be greatly appreciated.
Why a VPS can be better:<p>- Assured hardware continuity when you depart from the project (death, buy-out, vacation).<p>- Easy temporary duplicate server for migrating database.<p>- Remote console at a more affordable price.<p>- Affordable geographical distribution. (Provision in London and Tokyo just because you feel like it.)<p>- Rapid scale up. And scale down if the project turns out to only need a $15/month VPS.<p>- Instantly replace bad hardware on vacation.<p>- Rapid hard drive failure recovery.<p>- Better hardware (SAN + premium RAID, redundant power supplies, ECC memory).<p>- Better physical security (deep background checks for every person allowed in the building).