100%. We had 11 months where nobody touched the racks as an example and the visit 11 months later was the one to physically get a tool I had left there. I mentioned I even track drive time.

How much time did you spend deciding which components to upgrade and purchasing parts to later install? How much would you charge a client for that time?

Very little, but that is probably because we cover the server industry in-depth with reviews and such. I mentioned a bit that that knowledge is key. This is our cost analysis and not going to be the same for everyone.

For a business with growing needs (most people at the point of making the decision), won't they need to go to install more hardware frequently, if nothing else?

Stackoverflow was run on a few servers (don’t know about how many there are now) http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-upda...

Often you don’t need that much hardware.

That may be true. We grow 20-30% Y/Y which is not as big as many other places (but is more than most others in our space.) 20-30% growth we handle with refresh cycles since we have extra capacity.

A lot of businesses aren't growing at breakneck speeds, and with modern cpu/ram setups, are often massively underprovisioned. A very big car rental company you'd know the name of was being run on four servers, and they were only upgraded at EOL (if something broke, Dell had same day or next day service)

> They're such an underestimate as to be laughable

If I am reading the post correctly, those are actuals, not estimates.

They are perfect world actual hours that don't include any unexpected downtime, or any ancillary costs outside of racking.

> They are perfect world actual hours that don't include any unexpected downtime

It isn't clear from this particular post, but considering Patrick refers to "overprovisioning" and having a "hot spare" I get the impression that they have designed their DC setup to minimize unexpected downtime. Sure, it can still happen, but with proper up-front planning what you call "perfect world" can become typical.

> or any ancillary costs outside of racking

As I see it from Patrick's post and my own colo experience, there are three groups of costs for colo that are baked in to the cost of AWS compute and storage: capital cost of hardware (Patrick has a specific line item for this); facility cost; and labor for maintaining the hardware (which is the cost under discussion. What do you think is significant, missing, and unique to colo?