So... you save $9k a year in recurring and it will be more than 5 years before you break even due to your $68k up front equipment costs.
And that's assuming you don't have any needs to quickly scale up or down and you are limited to 1 colo instead of the ability to expand to multiple regions like with AWS.
And that's not even taking into account the cost of the brain power to make sure your hardware stays up and running.
Doesn't sound like rolling your own stuff in a colo is a very good idea in this case. But that's job security if you are the sys admin I guess.
> And that's not even taking into account the cost of the brain power to make sure your hardware stays up and running.
Although, as I said upthread, I agree that AWS is very likely ideal for this particular deployment size, let me try to dispell this oft-repeated myth.
Modern server hardware takes almost no "brain power" (or effort of any kind) to keep up and running.
We aren't living in the days of the early dot-com boom where Linux-on-Intel in the datacenter could mean flimsy cases, barely rack-mountable, with nary a redundant part to be seen.
Applying some up front "brain power", one can even choose and configure hardware in such a way as to provide things like server-level redundancy, if that's important and/or preferable to intra-server redundancy (think Hadoop), or the ability to abandon mechanical disks in place instead of ever having to replace one.
And that's assuming you don't have any needs to quickly scale up or down and you are limited to 1 colo instead of the ability to expand to multiple regions like with AWS.
And that's not even taking into account the cost of the brain power to make sure your hardware stays up and running.
Doesn't sound like rolling your own stuff in a colo is a very good idea in this case. But that's job security if you are the sys admin I guess.