Obviously small businesses don't have the option of building their own cloud, but there is a middle ground: use public clouds, but avoid coupling yourself to them. Most cloud providers provide servers that can be treated like a barebones Linux server, and that's all you really need to be productive with most server applications.
Then just use a colo center. It's worked for us for close to 20 years.
Last time someone had to perform hardware maintenance was at least 3 months ago. If you're small enough (20-30 servers for us) the things mostly run themselves. Any other overhead we have would be present if we were just using something like EC2.
The bulk of our hardware is 10 years old. We have some servers that are 17 years old and still chugging along.
> Last time someone had to perform hardware maintenance was at least 3 months ago. If you're small enough (20-30 servers for us) the things mostly run themselves.
If those servers are production servers, I'd say that's not small--you're already scaled to the point where you have hired a whole person (or two) to do server work, no?
I've worked at places where I'm the only technical person. I know enough to set up a Django server, but the reality is I'm not an IT guy, I'm a developer. Paying for a few cloud servers means we don't have to hire anyone to do server maintenance, which gives me an entire person's salary as a server budget before we have to consider whether hiring a person would be better. A lot of companies never reach the size where that becomes a concern.
Of course everybody wants to get big enough that they need a server farm, but as long as you don't vendor-lock yourself, moving from a virtual Linux server on the cloud to a physical server in a colo center is fairly trivial.
My personal website has been running on a single $10/mo Digital Ocean server for 5 years. I think it would be very difficult to beat that price with a colo center and physical hardware. Most businesses are obviously larger than that, but I think it's a bit of an overreach to claim that it's always more expensive to run on the cloud. It just isn't, for many real-life situations.
Congratulations, you’re now spending more on barebones servers than a colo and you’re still spending just as much on managing resources - now you have the worse of both worlds.
