Nearly every time we talk about our infrastructure, people ask us why we own and operate our servers rather than host Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network in the cloud. Usually when people ask us this, they seem to want to convince us that we should be in the cloud. The debate usually then centers around cost.

Cloud vs Self Hosting Cost?

The hypothetical cost of Stack Exchange being in the cloud has come up on meta. It turns out that the cost is difficult to actually figure out. Some of the things you need to take into account are:

• More or fewer Sysadmins required? (People say with the cloud you need fewer system administrators, never been convinced of this though)
• Licensing Costs
• Owned vs Rented Assets
• How many cloud “servers” or instances you would need vs real hardware
• Cost differences when you consider high availability

To really get this analysis correct you really have to invest a lot of time into the analysis, and even then it will only be an estimate. We have looked at cloud computing costs and we think it would actually be higher. When it comes down to it though the cost debate misses the point.

We Love Computers

and every aspect about them. We don’t just love programming and our web applications. We get excited learning about computer hardware, operating systems, history, computer games, and new innovations. Loving computers is an essential part of our company culture. Many of us have assembled our own workstations and our CTO even blogs about it in seven articles when he does. Most of us have grown up with computers as part of our identity. We all have a shared nostalgia of our first computers — if we haven’t taken our pilgrimage to the The Computer History Museum yet then we dream about it. We like to think about about the past, present, and future of computing. Owning and operating our own servers is part of how we get to live out our love of computers.

This culture means when we hire technical staff, we hire people who share this passion. I believe that this passion translates into a better product. Whenever someone does a cost analysis of cloud vs self hosting there is no row in the spreadsheet for “Work Productivity Increase due to Passion.” We are performance and control freaks and love to tweak everything including our hardware. If we outsourced our hosting to cloud computing, we would be outsourcing part of our passion. If you just want to use someone else’s computers, it means you don’t love computers — at least not every aspect to them. Sometimes cloud computing may be the best fit (for example if you have 20x the traffic around the holidays or tax season), but if you truly love computing, giving up control of computers to someone else will hurt.

We don’t just like computers, we love them. We have an emotional connection to them, and suggesting that we let someone else own, manage, and tweak them is like suggesting we get rid of what we love — just the thought of it offends.

Our collocation hosting provider is offering a deal for Server Fault users on managed and dedicated hosting. This deal has been posted on the Stack Exchange blog. Based on our experiences with Peer 1 as a collocation provider it is a company I recommend.

A little while back I answered a question on Server Fault about key things to look for where choosing a datacenter. This is a pretty concise checklist to go through when asking a sales engineer or at your datacenter visit. What I didn’t include are the sort of immeasurable (non-contractual) things that make a facility great that you are likely to learn from a recommendation. Our facility at Peer 1 NY has been great for us in ways that might seem small, but really do make the difference.

The on-site staff has a tremendous amount of useful expertise which they unabashedly share with us, they even know the most minute detail that most sysadmins wouldn’t know. This includes things like the different styles of mounting hardware, what sort of power usage they see from the latest generation of Dell servers vs. the previous generation, and general advice on how to lay things out in your racks.

At the NY facility they save the extra junk people leave there in one big hardware treasure box. These are little things like mounting hardware, power cables, and network cables which have saved my ass from time to time if I was missing something. The staff is immensely helpful; either providing some of these extra treasures, or helping mount a server that I was struggling to do myself. I can honestly say that I’ve never left the facility without completing the task because of some little thing I was missing.

When I originally deployed the network infrastructure at the NY facility, I was very particular about the redundancy I wanted. I wanted to use a private BGP peering for the setup and they were willing to work with me to get it whereas many providers only offer one solution.

Peer 1 (and their awesome staff) has proven to be consistently knowledgeable, flexible, helpful and reliable. The little service things they provide us with are oftentimes the difference between getting a job done or not. I am happy to recommend PEER 1 Hosting and our promotion with them.