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Pay until you own?
How long do pay until you own servers usually last? I saw Datacentec with offers after 12 months, but it doesn't seem reasonable for them to host for free even if the company doesn't shut down after a few years. Power bills eventually even out with the worthless hardware after a few years.
And also, what are some other reliable companies offering pay until you own, and any experiences?
Thanks
Comments
You don't get to colo it there for free after you own the server.
like "lease-purchase" in property market? Interesting.
no dude.. after your server is paid off you still need to pay for colo fees if you want to keep your server with dacentec..
Actually, rent to own servers don't become free after 12 months or whatever the term is. You just start paying for colocation and not the hardware itself, so for example with Dacentec's base RTO package, you pay $30 per month instead of $75 after 12 months.
I don't have any experience using RTO servers, so can't say anything about that, but it seems reasonable to pay for the colo+server for a while in case you can't pay for a server outright.
pay $50 for rent after own the server, pay $60 for colo... what for...
The other thing to note is that once you own the server.. you are fully responsible for it.. so any hardware failure you will have to pay out of pocket for replacement parts which may also incur installation fees from the DC, this can get pretty expensive.
it's better to just rent a server where the DC is responsible for maintaining your hardware.. if you decide you don't need the server or find a better deal else where you can just cancel and move on..
^^ This, I always give out a little shrug when I see companies saying "FULLY OWNED CO LOCATED EQUIPMENT" like it is a good thing when they are based in England and have the servers in Dallas
oh great so you wont get priority support on replacement, you need to have every conversation twice rather than letting the DC act autonomously, and a burnt out CPU and MB is no longer 4 hours down time max it is 3 days and £2000 worth of parts, shipping and remote hands fee's which was probably the cost of the server to begin with.
I get it if you are within driving distance, and keep spares for everything or have a very good working relationship with a DC (In the same country) other than that it is a bragging right that has no real foundation imo.
@AnthonySmith
Great advice!
The thing is with Dacentec, is their hardware is getting very close to legacy anyway. If you want the whole box there is a 2XL5420 1u minus the hard drive for $90 bucks right now on ebay. By the time you own one of those boxes a year from now you wont be able to give them away. If you want your own hardware just go buy it there and colo it somewhere.
And like AnthonySmith said, renting would be the better option... and you can get a much newer chip with newer hardware and you could just drop it when its getting older to rent a brand spanking new one after a year or two anyway. Renting does have some great advantages.
Thanks for the advice!
I totally agree with the others.
Owning your own server is pretty cool though but the thought of all those bills and issues that could and probably will arise should put anyone off especially if they don't have the correct gear to handle / $$ to deal with it.
If you really really want a physical server go buy a NAS or Server to screw around with install a Linux OS and have some fun with it.. They are cheap as chips now days.. And most home connections (in the US anyway) can deal with the traffic*
*dependant on what you host of course.
Not to play devils advocate for the cloud, but in this day and age companies and well just about everyone is moving away from physical hardware. Moving more towards a "you pay for what you need" model, why would you want to move the opposite way?
Not that I think renting servers is bad, I rent alot of servers.
Personally I beleive colocation should be used when it will either save money due to the number of servers they are colocating (e.g BuyVM, Prometeus etc) or when you have specialized hardware (e.g GPU's, DDoS mitigation equipment) that you cant rent affordably.
@SplitIce
Exactly!
not that I like the cloud that much either, but I do have a rather large client that has several different online stores move all there stuff recently to one of the big two cloud providers. They used to run all their servers in house but they had to have extra IT staff, pay poeple to sit and watch servers overnight, always worry about hardware failure, network issues etc.,
I tell my client all the time to go and just rent a some servers somewhere and save huge but he is pretty sold on all the techie buzzwords, and for him who cares, he's actually saving alot of money, has less staff he has to pay for, he's sleeping better at night, and even though I still think he could save more, its still a great business decision on his part.
FYI, I am slowly moving alot of my buisness units to a half way point (DigitalOcean). I consider it a good compromise. Since I already visualize all the components I gain the ability to provision on the fly as well as having a few extra containers and a server distribution for redundancy. And my current plan actually works out slightly cheaper :P
Of course all the servers that do all the heavy lifting in the business are not suitable for cloud. I presume this would be much the same for many people who run applications that need cheap raw performance (game servers, video encoding etc).
Yeah there is something to be said for being able to scale on the fly, that's for sure. And I have never once had a physical server delivered to me immediately when I pressed the 'place order' button.
I don't necessarily dislike the cloud, I'm actually pretty excited about the future of it. I just hate all the fud and marketing surrounding it. But yeah, there are really a lot of reasons why its a great choice over physical hardware, especially with HA, small aplications, etc., It would be mad and overkill to put some applications on physical hardware anymore, where it would be just a waste of energy, space, money etc.,
The cloud is built on physical hardware and physical hardware gets colocated. Someone has to do it.
Oh absolutley, I completely agree, like rackspace or amazon who already have their own huge infrastructure. Or even the smaller clouds or faux clouds that are out there...
I'm talking about the cloud from a customers perspective, those who don't or who have owned there own hardware - like one of my clients for example that ran all their stuff in house. It cost them way to much money, staff, utilities etc., and there business has nothing to do with tech even to begin with. For them it makes much more sense to use the cloud, I still think they should rent regular servers lol.. but even the cloud makes ten times more sense for them than owning and having to manage their own hardware.
In those cases I think it makes much more sense to use someone elses infrastructure than your own.
so, what benefit "pay until you own?"
I think when you have enough servers rented that it makes much more sense to own your own physical hardware rather than renting, like a lot of the big providers here like SplitIce said: BuyVM, Prometeus, Cloud Shards, VPSDime etc.,
Also probably if you have enough experience being successful and are profitable too. I'm sure you probably save a lot of money over renting, I'm guessing - since I don't own any of my own hardware - that if you got close to the point of renting an quarter rack to a of hardware it would start to make sense, maybe half.
But i could be completely wrong, I'm sure there are much more experienced here who could give you a more accurate figure though...
@klanggen
If you live close to the datacenter, you just get there and bring your hardware home, also you start to lease another one from the company... this way, you can sell the old hardware every year and get a few bucks for it...
still not worth to do this i guess, because the monthly price is a little bit pricier then paying for the same server at another provider, because they build in the loss of hardware at the end of the year in their monthly price. This way the price you can get for selling the old hardware is pretty much the same as the difference between the monthly fee of rent to own and normal renting service.
The only ones worth it are brand new hardware (not some ebay stuff) and 12 months. Anything longer - not really.
So say Rent To Own for E3 V3 $x/month for 12 months and then after that you just colo it or ship it elsewhere.
The idea is say you plan on keeping this server for 36 months then over a 36 months period you'd save money compared to renting for 36 months.
A lot of providers do Rent To Own as a means to lock you in. So it's win win on both sides. It's based on the idea that the user is likely to pay for the 12 months.
There's also buy downs - e.g. paying $x upfront and paying less every month - a sort of in between step.
Yes sometimes pay until you own means you buy rack server from comppany, then you pay until its your own, after that you pay only for traffic and electricity, okay to be honest its not great business and its not good for customers because all hardware becomes old and outdated.
Exsample you buy brand new samsung galaxy with pay until you own apx 24 months, of course you feel so happy at the first but after a while you see oh my phone is outdated and still 18 months to go nothing to do, its like a marriage with the comppany.
No, it's like a rental program. You don't have to pay upfront. You might not have that money or want to spend it like that.
It's all about ROI, with the number of $49 deals on E3's with decent RAM it's hard to justify RTO sometimes. A used E3 with 8GB RAM and 1 HDD in 1U is easily $1000. Minimum colo is $35/month (maybe $25 for some really low end plans but $35 seems to be a mimium reasonable plan) so it would take 71.4 months to break even on colocating that hardware ($49 - $35 = $14 for hardware).
What I want is a $49 E3 with one time HDD and RAM fees
awesome thread, so is here anyone doing this? i see some posts, but right now have rent to own? in any location, to know and maybe interested.
thanks
I agree with @talsit, I had both co-lo and rented servers for 11 years. Overall cost was lower and up time was better on the rented servers. I got rid of all the co-lo servers two years ago and I just rent servers and VPS now.