Not including extra human cost in the analysis is just disingenuous. I think to manage private servers of that size you would need at least two extra experts totalling at least $20k/month.
What? You set up the deployment once, and then you only need to touch it when things go horribly wrong, which is every couple of months, or to make minor quick tweaks and run some updates. Let's be generous, and say you need 10 h/month, which is about 1/16 of a person-month. And if things go horribly wrong, everybody drops what they are doing to fix things, anyway, no matter if you're on AWS, dedicated/colo or run your own data center.
When you significantly change your architecture/deployment, then you need to put in more time again, but if you build your code with need to scale and such things in mind from the get-go, then that won't come up much or at all.
Right, which is exactly why people pay extra for cloud managed services.
If things are going “horribly wrong” every couple of months then you must necessarily be on call 24/7 and never take vacation or time away. In practice, you need at least two people to manage on-call coverage so you’re not completely uncovered if someone gets sick, decides to take vacation, wants to travel away from a computer and so on.
And if that one sys-admin wants to go on vacation? Or travel away from a computer? Or takes another job?
You can never have “just one” admin handling a server and being on-call 24/7.
Would you really want a job where you could never, ever be away from a computer because you’re the only on-call person? This doesn’t work.
Works fine for me. $20K a month for two people doing f*k all is insane.
You don’t even need a single employee to manage a single server…
With Cloud and SaaS. They are so abstracted from Hardware that their knowledge on basic hardware and server, everything from CPU, Storage I/O and Network are close to zero.
Side Note, aren't they 2U?
The production boxes are 2U, but it can be done in a 1U box.
In the real world, once most hosting platforms are up and running, the maintenance overhead is pretty low.
Where? Costs vary hugely across the world