You're right. I'm wasn't really serious. Since I'm in the middle of calculating costs of own servers in rented racks in Poland (you're right labor is more difficult than hardware) let me imagine the rest of the infrastructure (probably not all) for this "projects", just for fun:

- network switch Juniper EX4600 (10Gbps ports) + 3rd party optics ~$11k

- cheap 1Gbps switch for management access <$1k

- some router for VPN for management network - $500

- 1Gbps (not guaranteed) internet access with few IPs ~$350 / month

- 100Mbps low traffic internet access for the management/OOB network.

Time to get the hardware - 2 months. Time to rent and install hardware in rack - about 1 month. I don't count configuring the software.

This setup is full of single points of failure so I would consider it one "region" and use something like CEPH + some spare servers in each "region". That way you don't need to react immediately to hardware failures. Just send a box of hardware from time to time to the DC and use ~$20-40h/h remote hands service to replace the failed drives or whole servers. You could also buy on-site service from the hardware vendor for 1-3 years adding some cost.

I think the most important thing would be have a cleaver person who design a fault tolerant system, automatic failover, good monitoring and alerting so that any on-call and maintenance job is easy and based on procedures. That way you could outsource it. Only then it might have some sense.