(of course, it doesn't give you all the fancy features of cloud hosting such as flexible pricing and automated provisioning)
Even still though, comparable hardware on softlayer's pricing looks like it's about $659/month. After 3 months it approaches a similar (but not identical) cost to the colo option.
genuinely interested; I'm considering getting in to the 'instant provisioned dedicated server' market myself; there's no technical reason why dedicated servers need to take more than, oh, about sixty seconds longer than a virtual server to set up.
The main reasons I'm aware of that provisioning dedicated servers take longer is because you have to deal with data center logistics. Which rack does it go in? Which VLANs does it need to be in? What bandwidth is the customer paying for and how will we route the uplink? If the customer has other machines can we put these new ones in the same rack without overloading the PDU?
There's a lot of hidden work that goes into data center management.
Sorry, I guess i wasn't clear. I meant renting a dedicated server, which I thought was comparable in cost to 'the cloud' - buying, of course, is more expensive in the short term and cheaper in the long term.
Personally, I think a /whole lot/ of the pain of owning (small amounts) of hardware is that most of the co-location vendors spend inordinate amounts of time trying to 'extract maximum value' (meaning, they fuck around on getting you a price, trying to get the max value you will accept.) I'm considering getting back in to the co-location business[1] in part because of this, and in part because it would let me scale to the point that it would help amortize out all the time I have to spend negotiating.
Man, I just spent three hours today talking to the owner of my data center, and he /still/ didn't give me a price. "tell me what you get from the other guy" - I mean, he's a nice guy, and I didn't really mind hanging out with him, I probably even got a little bit of useful information, but three hours of two guys, both whom can probably bill out at $100+/hr, and we still didn't arrive on a price for an operation as small as mine? (approx. 150a of 120v power and accompanying rackspace; 5 cabnets or so. This didn't even include bandwidth.)
One's got dual xeons w/ 12gb of ram and 4x500gb in raid 10 for like $320 a month, which works out to 42 cents an hour.
The other's a single xeon w/ 8gb of ram and 2x500gb raid 1 for $160 which works out to 22 cents an hour.
Both come with 10tb of bandwidth a month and are exclusively used by us, nobody is messing with our disk io or anything else.
I don't know how they compare with AWS' compute units etc but if you have an ongoing need for the hardware and you're going to be paying those hourly fees (and all the others) every day of every month then I suspect it's going to be a lot cheaper than AWS.
The xeons he's talking about are quad core, each, for a total of 8, vs. 2 cores of 3.25 ECU each for the high mem xtras.
The points about 8 vs. 2 cores still stands, though? Add to that that spot pricing isn't really comparable to guaranteed pricing (on demand is more comparable since dedicated servers are on-demand, you can cancel and get your month prorated).