"their own datacenter" both previously and now almost certainly means renting bare metal or colocation space from a provider. I highly doubt they have physically built their own datacenter from scratch

The fun part is that they do not understand what it means to have your "own datacentert" vs renting server in a co-lo. It does not matter if you are running on AWS on Hetzner it is somebody else's computer.

You can rent entire rooms from Hetzner and then only you (and I believe the government firefighters) have access cards.

In any case, there are options where you 100% own and control all hardware.

We were a similar sized company at about the same time - we owned our data centers in the same way we owned our offices - we leased and occupied them. Sure, if the plumbing sprouted a leak the landlord would come to in and fix it, but no one would be confused enough to say we didn’t have our own office space.

"The fun part is that they do not understand" YES, 37Signals, I company with a legendary pedigree of pushing technical boundaries and open minded with deployment models totally doesn't know the simple thing that you do.

Get a grip.

What the heck are you talking about? Do you even know how colocation works?

For starters, even small companies can have their own physical datacenters, although that's not necessarily what we're talking about.

Second, renting hardware has absolutely nothing to do with colocation.

"renting bare metal or colocation space from a provider"

Those are two totally, completely different things. Their own datacenter means their own equipment in a datacenter and could even mean building out their own datacenter. It never, ever means renting bare metal.

>It never, ever means renting bare metal.

Weird, in my company where we are doing the opposite migration (from traditional datacenter where we manage the physical servers to Azure) this is exactly what we mean and say and how we describe it

We talk about "our datacenter" when we really mean racks of servers we rented from Insight, and we say "the cloud" when we refer to Azure. We've never actually had our own datacenter meaning a building we own and manage the entire physical plant of

Almost no one means it that way. Even Twitter is probably leasing colocation space in the "their own datacenter" category vs. GCP and AWS. The evidence is in the fact that Elon was able to just arbitrarily shut down an "entire datacenter". Or that 37signals was able to just arbitrarily move into "their own datacenter" on a whim

Referring to rented servers as colocated servers is flatly wrong, no matter how often people are incorrect about it. Sure, some providers put colocation under the same category as VMs and leased hardware, but that doesn't make them overlap.

OTOH, referring to a datacenter of servers that you lease as a datacenter is one thing, but if you have zero hardware that you own in it, would it really be your datacenter, or would it be "the datacenter"?

A datacenter could be anything from a set of IKEA shelves in a room with Internet and power to a fully built out fancy space with redundant power, fire suppression, a full Internet exchange, et cetera, so it's a bit gatekeepery to try to suggest that only huge companies would ever have their own datacenter or their own space with their own hardware in a datacenter.

I'm sure that's the truth of the matter.