We are running a Hybrid infrastructure. We use Rackspace and our own hosted servers at our office.
We are also bootstrapping this thing. At the beginning we thought creating and setting up our own servers (Google-style) was the way to go. We started at our office, but eventually just got to big for us to support.
We are only 4 people in the company, and we have other things to do than to manage all the servers. So we started using Rackspace.
Let me tell you cost-wise, it is not that different. We still had to pay for a good network pipe, and also cooling for the servers. So electricity was also expensive.
It is not a bad idea to host your own servers. It works fine at the beginning, with time it just gets too hard to scale without a team of people dedicated to that, and while bootstrapping that is though.
Using a provider has worked great for us, and I think it was a great choice to use a Cloud provider instead of fully hosting on-site.
We are also bootstrapping this thing. At the beginning we thought creating and setting up our own servers (Google-style) was the way to go. We started at our office, but eventually just got to big for us to support.
We are only 4 people in the company, and we have other things to do than to manage all the servers. So we started using Rackspace.
Let me tell you cost-wise, it is not that different. We still had to pay for a good network pipe, and also cooling for the servers. So electricity was also expensive.
It is not a bad idea to host your own servers. It works fine at the beginning, with time it just gets too hard to scale without a team of people dedicated to that, and while bootstrapping that is though.
Using a provider has worked great for us, and I think it was a great choice to use a Cloud provider instead of fully hosting on-site.