What about the cost of having people actually go to the datacenter to install hardware, and go again whenever there is a hardware problem, possibly resulting in much longer downtimes than with a rented server?

Especially for the "one (or a few) big server" scenario in the article, that would seem to me a pretty big factor.

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tgtweak 5 days ago | parent [-]

At 1 rack scale you're saving ~20-30k/mo in cloud fees - you can hire an excellent sysadmin in the 12-15k/mo range and they can do a lot more than just go to the datacenter as needed.

	▲	brazzy 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		But we're not comparing colo to cloud fees, we're comparing colo to renting a server.