It's true even for hobbyist-scale. I can rent 1/3rd of a rack at Hetzner facility in Helsinki for €120/month. They'll even throw in a BGP session, 1gbit uplink and 2TB of traffic for free.
Sure, I need to put a physical server in there, but it's not hard to get something decent for €300-ish on ebay.
And €120/month is nothing for rack space when comparing to how easy it is to rack up an AWS bill. Also, it's 14U space, so scaling is also quite trivial.
And this is Hetzner, getting a 2U space in some local datacenter might be even cheaper.
I'm actually strongly considering doing this, cause currently I'm renting 2 dedis from them at about €90/month. If I need more capacity, it's definitely going to be cheaper in the long run to just colocate.
Out of curiosity, why go with a rack rather than just renting a server from them? At hobbyist scale this would be more cost-effective no? FYI they can give you 10Gbps uplinks on their servers too for an extra fee, no need for colo.
Sure, I need to put a physical server in there, but it's not hard to get something decent for €300-ish on ebay.
And €120/month is nothing for rack space when comparing to how easy it is to rack up an AWS bill. Also, it's 14U space, so scaling is also quite trivial.
And this is Hetzner, getting a 2U space in some local datacenter might be even cheaper.
I'm actually strongly considering doing this, cause currently I'm renting 2 dedis from them at about €90/month. If I need more capacity, it's definitely going to be cheaper in the long run to just colocate.