[HCoop-Discuss] Dedicated servers?

[Adam Chlipala]

Thinking about our recent discussions about VPS possibilities for HCoop, 
it's occurred to me that something that might normally be called 
"dedicated servers" might be more appropriate for us.  Since we can 
easily utilize whole machines, we don't have much reason price-wise to 
try to get our hands on slices of full machines, and it's nice to avoid 
the overheads and uncertainties about resource sharing that come from VPSes.

We had a rented "dedicated server" (fyodor) at InterServer for a few 
years.  InterServer had some questionable business practices that make 
me want to avoid dealing with them again, but I think it would be unwise 
to write off the idea of dedicated servers, just because we "traded up" 
from them in the past.  I think our experience with our Peer 1 set-up 
has shown that we really aren't equipped to handle hardware addition and 
maintenance at even a quarter of the speed that our members expect by 
default.  I'm sure we could solve this by hiring staff for enough pay, 
but I don't know that we are willing to raise dues enough to cover 
that.  It seems like our best bet for our current membership size is to 
be paying someone else to keep a set of machines up and running.

Ideally, there would be some provider that lets us buy a server 
up-front, such that, thereafter, we pay a monthly fee that only covers 
their staffing, data center costs, and replacement parts (with this last 
cost weighted by the probabilities that different components fail).  I 
haven't found an offer like that yet, though; maybe we could negotiate 
with someone, after a trial period of paying the usual monthly rate.

What does everyone this about this vs. VPSes vs. colocating hardware 
that we own?