Dedicated Servers vs Cloud

Imagine buying a server and colocating.

A bit less terrible way in my opinion:Find a dedicated server provider and rent the hardware. These companies rent some part of the datacenter (or sometimes build their own). Bonus points if they offer KVM - as in remote console, not the Linux hypervisor. Also ask if they do hardware monitoring and proactively replace the failed parts. All of this is still way cheaper than cloud. Usually with unmetered networking.Way less hassle. They'll even take your existing stuff and put it into t

That's more in line for colocation than just a hosted solution. They probably don't have that much hardware laying around that's unused.

Why not rent one or more dedicated servers rather than collocation. That way you don’t have to tend to hardware issues while still being cheaper than the cloud.

Got it, buy the cheapest possible 600$ server, pay 200$/month to collocate it (also do a cost benefit of different facilities), be responsible for all hardware failures and availability issues.

Why not buy your own server and get it collocated?

You can rent racks of servers from a dedicated hosting provider and spend 10X less than AWS. You don't need to do you own wiring and HVAC and shit.

Rent servers from a local provider. It's cheaper, you get more control over the hardware, but most of all, it avoids correlated failures.

You lease colocated servers at more competitive rates (power and bandwidth included), or buy them and install them in leased racks, or build your own datacenters. Cloud providers charge a lot in return for not requiring this kind of commitment; they have to amortize datacenters and support staff with a lot of spare capacity.

You can just rent bare metal (or "root servers", as it was once called). Then it just have to worry about the occasional hardware defect, but at small scales that basically never happens.