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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

No, but they make many availability issues Someone Else's Problem.

When EC2 goes down, I need to maybe wake up and log in to see what happened. I see that all of us-east-1 is down (again), notify everyone involved: "It's down can't do anything, it'll come back up when AWS engineers get to it" and go back to bed.

I can check up on it again during office hours.

If this was a colocated server, I'd need to drag my ass out of bed and drive to the site to see what's up.

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Drive to a colo? Most colos have 'remote hands' where you can have an onsite tech do stuff for you. There's also OOB management tools you can use (assuming the hardware isn't toast).

AWS is really expensive if you have the skills to managed hardware yourself.

See that last sentence there. You have to pay to get those skills, that's why Amazon can charge for it.

Well, we're also at a position where "You won't be fired for using Amazon". Suggesting colo at all gets you the same looks and derision suggesting PostgreSQL used to.

Remote hands are expensive, and in my experience in using them at DC's all over the world, they're also not very competent certainly not to the point of being able to diagnose and fix issues for you. The best you could hope for with them is normally having them get OOB working so you can do most of the work yourself, and maybe try to swap some hardware if you can provide them documentation on EXACTLY what to do.

Remote hands are often contracted from online marketplaces for such people. I do this occasionally as it's easy money. We do exactly what you tell us to do without any insight into why we are doing this. My objective is to be on-site for 15 minutes and get you back into your equipment. It occasionally takes up to 2 hours to just get past the datacenter security. The most useful docs are a series of pictures on your equipment with labels. It is also helpful to tell us how to safely disconnect uncommon connectors.

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