[BBLISA] Colocation questions

[Dan Ritter]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 01:40:54PM -0500, Rob Taylor wrote:
> Hi Guys. I had asked a question about co-location last night, and I got a few responses.
> To the people who responded, if people wouldn't mind, could you re-iterate why you chose to go that way?
> ROI, scalability, re-purposing of space, etc..? Also, if you don't mind, can you let me know the scale of the migration? 2 racks, 15 racks, 
> how long you've been there, how hard was it to move to the facility, experiences with the colo staff for "remote hands" etc....
> 

If you re-ask it here, you might get even more responses.

I'm guessing your question is: why does one choose to own
servers in colo data centers, with the other likely options
being:

- own servers, house them internally

- rent physical servers from managed colo

- rent virtual servers from cloud company

- rent computational services from cloud company

The number one question underlying all of these choices is: what
is your business model?

(And the number two question: what is your growth rate? evenly 
matched with What are your resources?)

If your business model depends on fast growth, lots of eyeballs and eking
a living out from the margin between the cost of providing a service and
the payments you can get from advertising companies... you probably need
something that can be scaled as fast as your credit card limit maxes
out. That means virtual servers, and don't forget to turn them off as
soon as they are less than necessary.

If your business model is predictable growth within your
means of provisioning, then owning your own servers is highly
cost-efficient. Paying for colocation is then a choice about the
reliability of shared infrastructure investment versus the control of
the infrastructure you can afford on your own.

Is that basically what you wanted to ask?

-dsr-