FYI: If you're in a similar situation, think very carefully before you build your own. The $17000 might sound like a lot; but when you take into account your time and risk tolerance, renting might be a much better solution.

I think their retrospective at the end of the article is grounded and logical:

"If I were to do this again, I wouldn’t do a custom build like this. I would buy a standard datacenter server and rent space in a colocation center"

I'm sure there are use cases when renting makes sense, but it can get crazy expensive really fast if you're not careful.