> I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs (and server hardware is expensive up front).

Yes, there is.

Honestly, it looks to me that this school of thought is mostly adopted by people that can't do arithmetic or use a calculator. But it does absolutely exist.

That said, no, servers are not nearly expensive enough to move the needle on a company nowadays. The room that often goes around them is, and that's why way more people rent the room than the servers in it.

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sam_lowry_ 6 days ago | parent [-]

Connectivity is a problem, not the room.

I ran the IT side of a media company once, and it all worked on a half-empty rack of hardware in a small closet... except for the servers that needed bandwidth. These were colocated. Until we realized that the hoster did not have enough bandwidth, at which point we migrated to two bare metal servers at Hetzner.

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marcosdumay 6 days ago | parent [-]

It's connectivity, reliable power, reliable cooling, and security.

The actual space isn't a big deal, but the entire environment has large fixed costs.

	▲	sam_lowry_ 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		In abstract yeah. In practice, all that except connectivity is relatively easy to have on-site. Connectivity is highly dependent on the business location, local providers, their business plans and their willingness to go out of their way to serve the clients. And I am not talking only about bandwidth, but also reserve lines and latency.