When your server requirements get into needing 5-6 servers (not at all atypical for a startup in their first year of being launched), running your own stuff becomes more of a challenge pretty quickly. Factor in 2-3x growth a year, and the challenges just mount.
What challenges are you thinking of? You buy a full-rack in colocation and then just buy servers/hardware when required.
If a company has the budget for AWS or some other cloud provider then they would have a budget for colocation; which in long term is cheaper. I see no additional challenge other than maintaining X amount of hardware than just one.
Buying upfront hardware is not feasible even if I had the cash(which most don't), I don't know if the company would last that long or would be doing things that require x servers .
What you are saying is similar to saying may be it is cheaper to buy the building /floor instead of renting space for office. - most small biz cannot afford do that, or expect their business to change (fail/take off) in the time frame ROI would come to take that commitment.
This is all assuming that a the startup has skill in setting up and managing physical servers and there is no opportunity costs( delayed features) on doing so, both are not a given.
small companies ( and poor people) typically don't buy low quality stuff or buy into rent seeking business models because they are dumb it is usually because they cannot afford to do long term thinking.
You only need one server, slap on a hypervisor and your rocking. Heck you can buy entry servers from dell for budget; upgrade later.
A 10u rack, which is adequate for any small business comes to around $500 a month in LA. 4u would be more than enough for a startup and that's around $200/month.
Is the start-up not going to purchase computer hardware, monitors, television screens for their clients when they sit in the waiting room? Email accounts with Office365, a website, a domain name? If they can fit that in to their budget I am pretty sure they could afford a server and colocation space.
> What you are saying is similar to saying may be it is cheaper to buy the building /floor instead of renting space for office. - most small biz cannot afford do that, or expect their business to change (fail/take off) in the time frame ROI would come to take that commitment.
But colocation is dynamic. Contracts can be negotiated.
> buy into rent seeking business models
And AWS isn't a rent seeking business model?
Looking at EC2 instances, for 120GBHD, 32 cores "Dedicated" instance, your looking at 679.54 USD for a month. 120GB isn't much especially when the developers start doing their thing.
For $500 you can have so much more, and hardware you actually own and that if the company does not lift off it can then be sold. Is that not the better investment?
No remarks to lack of skills.
This comment just screams of engineer-only focus. Running servers yourself brings almost no value to the customer and is a specialized skill that you have to pay for. All to solve... a couple days of service-specific downtime a year? People need to chill out with their non-mission critical software. God forbid someone can't access their HR portal for an hour.
No. You rack the server, connect the cable to the switch press the on-switch, let it boot and then operate as you would with any other computer. Need a new server? Get the DCOps remote hands to Rack the server, cable it to the switch and press the on-switch. If you can install Windows 10, you can install Linux.
> This comment just screams of engineer-only focus. Running servers yourself brings almost no value to the customer and is a specialized skill that you have to pay for.
Hmm, the data is yours; You own the data and that's value to me if I am the customer. And there's no value to the customer if you were to host it in the cloud either, much of a loss retrospectively.
There is no specialized skill you have to pay for, sure if you were going to run a high-density compute mainframe running some specialized OS like AIX then yeah sure. To buy a server, install a OS and plug it in to a switch and navigate it with SSH requires no overqualified anything.
To your second point: We still own the data for hosted solutions. We have our backups, we have direct access. Barring a catastrophic failure and wiping of AWS, our data is there and ours. The value to our customers for using cloud providers is the time saved on building infrastructure is instead spent on delivering value to the customer in the form of features/bug fixes. And yes I know the argument of "you end up spending more time debugging AWS", but I think you don't need to reach that point if you keep things pretty simple, especially early stage.
I think you're vastly oversimplifying the task. And if I had to guess, it's something you're pretty familiar with so it makes sense that it's easy to you! I'm sure an early stage company would be happy to have you to save a ton of money in their early days on infrastructure costs
