We were a similar sized company at about the same time - we owned our data centers in the same way we owned our offices - we leased and occupied them. Sure, if the plumbing sprouted a leak the landlord would come to in and fix it, but no one would be confused enough to say we didn’t have our own office space.

"The fun part is that they do not understand" YES, 37Signals, I company with a legendary pedigree of pushing technical boundaries and open minded with deployment models totally doesn't know the simple thing that you do.

Get a grip.

You can rent entire rooms from Hetzner and then only you (and I believe the government firefighters) have access cards.

In any case, there are options where you 100% own and control all hardware.

What the heck are you talking about? Do you even know how colocation works?

For starters, even small companies can have their own physical datacenters, although that's not necessarily what we're talking about.

Second, renting hardware has absolutely nothing to do with colocation.