Yes, it really does look like @stephen-mw is talking about a migration to an owned/colocated hardware. And that's a very different kind of hairy mess I'd prefer to stay away from as long as humanly possible.

OMG, colo. I've been the architect of a Top 500 website acquired by a Top 100 and even for that we just rented a few servers (you'd be surprised how few -- a dozen or so). I do not really know how big you need to be make colo a sensible choice but quite probably much, much bigger than most think of. We ran the numbers and they weren't pretty.

And for cloud: we purchased video conversion as a service, that one ran in the cloud. I can see how that makes sense.

and if you have more than one? or more than one dc? somebody needs to connect it, or you will need a VPN. it's not that easy without Clouds if you need connected servers. We switched to AWS since connecting servers in a dc isn't as cheap as people think of.

I host all my stuff with Hetzner (who are at the cheap end of the market compared to Softlayer) and even they provide pre-configured VLANS and private switches. For intra-DC you can just setup some redundant openvpn links or pay the dc to configure a hardware tunnel between both sites.

We get free inter-DC connectivity for free with Softlayer. There really is no difference for us between connecting to a server within a DC or between datacenters (aside from added latency, of cource) – the same private address space, the same access rules (we see all of our machines in a private backend network from any datacenter).

This article was talking about renting servers from Softlayer. All servers on your account in Softlayer have a private VLAN that connects them, even between data centers. Private networks for your servers are a feature of many server hosts.

Every enterprise router in existence has built-in tunnel support. Even the open source ones like PFSense.