[lbriner]

We are seriously considering moving downwards from a dedicated server to some kind of BYOD/co-location.

1) Our server is at least 5 years old but you are still paying a high monthly charge. We have probably paid back 5 times its cost already (I know this includes power/air-con etc)

2) Even a recent quote for another 256GB RAM was quoted at $1200 install and $300 PER MONTH!

3) We find that the support are not quite good enough for anything other than the basics. We had a network performance issue that we insisted was something in their infra and they denied it, it was only after I used Wireshark to prove the problem that they finally found it. YMMV of course.

4) We run some test Hypervisors and then only support Windows + Hyper-V (or VMWare on their "cloud"). I don't mind Windows except the monthly Windows updates are very slow and tedious and require VMs to be shutdown.

5) We are getting performance issues because ultimately, each Hypervisor has one disk (might be RAID1) and 10 VMs all writing to it, this seems to have affected throughput, particularly on build agents which write a lot of stuff to disk.

On the plus side:

1) We get 24 hour support for major outages, whether caused by them or us. They obviously can't fix anything we have broken but we at least have someone to call if the network seems to have gone down, for example.

2) We can have additional equipment run up reasonably quickly without having to purchase it or go to site.

If we move to co-location, we can probably get an amazing server with 4 disks and 1024GB RAM for less than $10K, run Xen or Proxmox on it and get much better performance, although whether they would charge much less is the question. I don't know how many co-loc providers want people with only 1 or 2 servers, I guess they prefer the big corps who want to move 10 racks worth of stuff there.