Colocation, which means buying your own hardware up front and running and managing it in a third-party site,  is not usually seen as a cheaper alternative to cloud. But, oddly enough, it can be.

Last week I compared cloud instances against dedicated servers showing that for long running uses such as databases, it’s significantly cheaper if you go with dedicated servers, but that’s not the end of it. Since you are still paying for those server resources every month, if you project the costs out 1 or 3 years, you end up paying much more than if you had just bought the hardware outright. This is where buying your own hardware and colocating it becomes a better option.

Continuing the comparison with the same specs for a long running database instance, If we price a basic Dell R415 with x2 processors each with 8 cores, 32GB RAM, a 500GB SATA…