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Comment by 1f60c | Hacker News Reader

> a $400,000 grant

IDK if they could bag this kind of grant every year, but isn't this the scale where cloud hosting starts to make sense?

400k could get you 10 Dell Poweredges with a 128 core CPU, 256GB of RAM and multiple terabytes of storage _multiple times_. 400k easily covers two of these machines, and colocation space is about 2k per year.

Cloud hosting only makes sense at a very, very small scale, or absurdly large ones.

So that they can pay 100x more expenses for.. no gain? They would pay an arm just for traffic.

CloudFlare is free/cheap and hey presto, no servers to manage!

Counterpoint: that would require using CloudFlare.

That is, in my opinion, far superior to using a single server ran by "someone".

I guess that is the beauty of opinions: they can be different from person to person. In my case, I would rather avoid CloudFlare if possible.

And when your Cloudflare site is down, most of the Internet is down too! There's no downside!

That's true. It will be down much less often than a single server in someone's basement.

It's OpEx. MBAs will pour unlimited money into OpEx to avoid CapEx.

Clearly I don't have an MBA because this mindset doesn't make sense to me. Burning money unnecessarily is burning money unnecessarily, no matter where it's burned.

You have two options. Colo if you still want physical access to your devices, or cloud, where you get access to nothing beyond some online portals.

Colo is when you want to bring your own hardware, not when you want physical access to your devices. Many (most?) colo datacenters are still secure sites that you can't visit.

I've only ever seen that at data centers that offer colo as more of a side service or cater to little guys who are coloing by the rack unit. All of the serious colocation services I've used or quoted from offer 24/7 site access.

Basically anywhere with cage or cabinet colocation is going to have site access, because those delineations only make sense to restrict on-site human access.

To be quite honest I've never seen a colo that didn't offer access at all. The cheapest locations may require a prearranged escort because they don't have any way to restrict access on the floors, but by the time you get to 1/4 rack scale you should expect 24/7 access as standard.

Same. We would colo and had racks behind chain link fencing that was locked behind cipher locks

Every colo I've visited has a system for allowing physical access for our equipment, generally during specific operating hours with secure access card.

secure access cards, IDing, bag check, and a tech following you around. Of course cabinets are all locked up as well.

A lot of these places are like fortresses

While this is true, you stated a tautology: of course every colo you visited allows visiting.

They could have visited in an official function such as inspector while customers didn't have direct physical access to the facility.

I don't think so. I don't think anybody is going to hand off their server and ask someone else to hook it up. Also, you need access so you can troubleshoot hardware issues.

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