> "it's hard to run a server, let along a server cluster" propaganda - it is not hard at all.
It's not hard at all if you have skills to manage hardware switches, deal with rack power budget, configure the power on sequence, establish procedures for hardware failures, establish procedures for disk management, redundancy, early earnings and replacements, deal with rolling out firmware updates for all components, provision resource limits between apps, provision and secure iLO or similar access, configure hardware monitoring and alerting, maybe run a SAN, ... (and lots of other things)
Sure, it's not hard when you have those skills. And you can offload some of that to another company if you're doing single servers rather than full rack(a). But it's not exactly a common set of skills either.
Edit: Also you can easily forget things at small scale. Just remembered LTT's "Sure we can host our video archive ourselves. Oops, forgot to turn on scrubbing. Aaand the old archive is gone."
It's not hard at all if you have skills to manage hardware switches, deal with rack power budget, configure the power on sequence, establish procedures for hardware failures, establish procedures for disk management, redundancy, early earnings and replacements, deal with rolling out firmware updates for all components, provision resource limits between apps, provision and secure iLO or similar access, configure hardware monitoring and alerting, maybe run a SAN, ... (and lots of other things)
Sure, it's not hard when you have those skills. And you can offload some of that to another company if you're doing single servers rather than full rack(a). But it's not exactly a common set of skills either.
Edit: Also you can easily forget things at small scale. Just remembered LTT's "Sure we can host our video archive ourselves. Oops, forgot to turn on scrubbing. Aaand the old archive is gone."