It was definitely not one of my better worded comments :)
colo == renting space/cooling/power from a datacenter provider to run your own servers.
on-prem == on premise installs/support
They have two revenue models, SaaS and Selling you support [1]. Giltlab has a "loss leader strategy" like many online businesses. The difference is that in this case, their free plan will grow so exponentially fast, it will become a huge cost center.
Also, to add to my simplistic post above, colo wasn't meant to only imply Gitlab having to run everything, for example, they could go with a managed provider, and have them run the network/hardware site of things. This is also still substantially less expensive than the cloud, when your biggest bills will be storage and bandwidth ( which of course, is my assumption ). From their tech postings, it seems their problem domain doesn't allow them to utilize s3 or any other other massive scale distributed storage, so they have been primarily utilizing block storage.[2][3]
colo == renting space/cooling/power from a datacenter provider to run your own servers. on-prem == on premise installs/support
They have two revenue models, SaaS and Selling you support [1]. Giltlab has a "loss leader strategy" like many online businesses. The difference is that in this case, their free plan will grow so exponentially fast, it will become a huge cost center.
Also, to add to my simplistic post above, colo wasn't meant to only imply Gitlab having to run everything, for example, they could go with a managed provider, and have them run the network/hardware site of things. This is also still substantially less expensive than the cloud, when your biggest bills will be storage and bandwidth ( which of course, is my assumption ). From their tech postings, it seems their problem domain doesn't allow them to utilize s3 or any other other massive scale distributed storage, so they have been primarily utilizing block storage.[2][3]
[1]https://about.gitlab.com/products/ [2]https://about.gitlab.com/2015/01/03/the-hardware-that-powers... [3]https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/