Let's play a game.

How long will it take you to get:

3 webservers 2 databases

Across 2 data centers.

Starting with nothing but a credit card, (and an email address).

You could probably have it up on Hetzner or OVH in a couple hours. Lots of dedicated server hosts with more than one DC, and many give you your server in an hour or two.

For colo, or dedicated/managed hardware?

I'm going off the goalposts in your original question.

Outside of performance, how are hosted dedicated servers different than hosted VPS?

Are you trading one cloud provider's feature set for another?

You still outsourcing via PaaS, and not actually investing in IT.

Physical isolation, control of whole environment, and more security/reliability/predictability when these are leveraged properly. You also have less legal risk if the FBI decides to kick in that colo's doors as they have in the past and seize shared servers just because one client was on it. I doubt the quantitative risk of this is high but I like risks not existing where possible.

And you're never investing in IT if you are doing IaaS or PaaS: you're just paying a third party for a temporary good. Colocation is investing in IT because you own the equipment and what's in it. The other parts are their problem with them having a financial incentive (eg competitiveness) to improve them over time.

Cloud can shut down tomorrow and what do you get out of that? If it's my PC with my data, I can get it back from them somehow and people trying to stop that might face criminal charges. A VPS service shutting down means my system probably ceases to exist unless they have specific provisions for the situation that work during bankruptcy. You might know of them since you clearly study the cloud offerings more. I don't so I stay in a low-risk situation.

So you don't want to use AWS because the risk Amazon will shut it down tomorrow?

I like how you ignored the most important stuff (first sentence) and a peripheral risk with precedent (second sentence) to focus on the lowest concern I had. Plus, that concern applies to more than Amazon: many vendors out there. Nice troll tactic, though.

You raised the point. I just called attention to it.

Also, ad hominem.

To just that. What of the main points of dedicated vs VPS?

Physical separation from other users defeats virtualization attack surface and many, covert channels immediately. Control down to hardware layer lets you do neat improvements to performance (eg custom drivers), maintenance (eg transactional kernels), and security (eg CheriBSD on FPGA-based CHERI processor). I also pointed out you can get more predictable with the implication of using a RTOS or other deterministic software + hardware combos. Heck, might even send in AS/400's, NonStop's, and/or OpenVMS clusters on cheap Alpha/Itanium servers to get uptime you haven't seen in cloud world: 17+ years for one OpenVMS cluster.

Those are the strongest points that cloud can't touch at all so far. The cloud-style research on making something comparable with strong correctness arguments is in infancy and almost all academic R&D. Which implies things about what they're using now... Of course, the outages and papers at DEFCON etc already told us that, didn't they?

I did high-security systems so let's modify that for what I would trust. Five servers that offload TCP/IP, a firewall, VPN, and packet/session authentication onto a PCI card with hardened RTOS (ex: Sentinel's HYDRA firewall). Let's me send sanitized data directly to application through trusted interface among other things. Further, the business's I.P. must be protected: physical separation rather than virtualization + legal protection through regulation and contracts. It will also need to run constantly, be tested periodically by intentional fail-overs, and have predictable cost despite this.

So, I spend 10-30 minutes Googling. I find Hong Kong and Switzerland are among best for regulations on data. Settle on Switzerland for various reasons. I haggle for a few hours with hosting companies to set up the deal. I have some hardware shipped 1-3 business days from other companies. We spend a few hours setting it up, doing disk encryption, configuring the guard (PCI card), setting up link encryption, and testing both sides in various ways. We save & standardize anything we figure out for scripted, instant deployment and testing when we scale out. I ship the relevant boxes to the datacenter. Meanwhile, I deploy the local boxes and thoroughly test the site.

Offshore site is probably up before the week is over. I spend a day re-running the tests. I simulate a bunch of fail-overs in various situations to make sure it works no matter what. Once I'm confident in it, we move all the relevant data into both of them. We might have already done that before shipping it if the situation allowed & then we just move what changed. We transition our domain to point at the new service. The users use it. If it fails, it fails over to the other one. The cost is likely $1,000+/mo and pretty flat except for the times where it takes the main load. Not likely to overdo my cap with only 3 webservers, though.

So, in summary, I have several secure boxes, total control of them, data at rest protection, data in transit protection, regulatory protection, acceptable network speed, predictable albeit higher cost, and long-term stability in various ways. It took around two weeks last time I did something like this. Given they usually charge for the rack, best to always ship a few extra boxes that stay off or idle: reduces impact of shipping time when boxes fail or workload increases.

What does Amazon charge and with what wait for a comparable offering with strong host, network, and I.P. protection?

It's not difficult to come up with a specific set of requirements that make 3rd party hosting suboptimal or even impossible. We have customers who do not want their data to leave their data centers, so we must oblige.

For many situations, services like AWS are a god send. Resources that were typically allocated to infrastructure can now be reallocated to other areas. With a little bit of common sense hopefully areas that drive real business value.

Cloud isn't appropriate for all situations, but I assert that for many, it is, and "investing in IT" isn't a default directive.

Oh, I agree with you that cloud offerings can be beneficial for a number of situations. I've strongly considered them for two areas in particular: non-confidential apps that need bandwidth that's too expensive to set up locally; one-off or temporary projects using non-confidential apps or data; backup storage of encrypted data or non-sensitive data. Hosting companies are usually good enough for most stuff but I've seen nice cost & ease of use arguments for above cases. I keep my eye open for other use cases I haven't seen.

The tech I'm most excited about are the various private cloud, open hardware, and cloud software initiatives. This stuff can bring a lot of the advantages in-house with few of the issues I gripe about. I hope to see continued innovation in that area.

Before, we used to call this "hosting".

And Dev Ops was called "IT"