Originally Posted by minusonebit

I have one server on the sweetheart plan. The other 7 of them I own and have colocated at various datacenters.

If you don't buy shit (Dell) then stuff rarely "breaks". A web server is not like a car that gets out of alignment and needs a new tie rod every now and again. I build my own servers or in a couple of cases have bought Sun boxes. I use only top notch hardware and so I dont have shit failing all over. Dell and thier ilk make some of the worst servers ever so I can see why you'd be worried about buying one of them and shove it off somewhere that would require an airplane trip to go fix every time it shit itself.

Hard drives are somewhat of an exception to this, but even then most severs built today use shit drives. I use only enterprise class drives in my servers and sure, they cost alot more but they don't fail very often. And if they do, I don't care. RAID takes care of the data and next time I at the data center I swap failed drives out, replace them with new ones, rebuild the images and send the dead ones back under the five year warranty. All of my stuff has hotswap bays (Chenbro cases rock - most of mine, IIRC are built on the 3U RM31408 or the 1U RM11704B), so if I am not going to the DC for a long time I will send the DC new HDDs, tell them what to swap and pay for admin time and give them a label to send me the dead ones back in the box that the new ones came in.

And who the fuck ships severs? I'd never trust UPS, etc with something that important. You want something done right you do it yourself. When it comes time to move a server, I go rent a car or van or whatever and drive to the data center and do it myself. Its costs just about as much and I can write the whole thing off, making a few vacation stops on the way home. I don't move servers that often. Thats because I don't change hosts often and thats because I wont set shit up in a data center that I am not 110% satisfied with and have checked out before hand. For most of my hosts, the one in my sig excepted, I am one of the oldest customers they have.