After about 14 years, I just took home the last colocated physical server that we owned. All our sites have moved to cloud servers, mostly at Amazon and Rackspace.
Hopefully I will never have to buy a physical server again. No more exploding fans (yes), funny motherboard timing errors, and faulty RAID arrays. No more memory upgrades. No more dead power supplies. No more “I have to put a CD drive into this box first before I can boot it”.
When my wife and I came to California in 1995, we were looking for an ISP, and found NetGate in next-door Santa Clara. First, we were dial-up users there (oh, the times as they have changed: their original ftp server ran on Apple Unix if memory serves right). From about 1998, I’ve also had a colocated server there. Always appreciated the personalized support which we couldn’t have gotten anywhere else.
Alas, the world moves on. My sites have moved into the cloud, and NetGate also has interested plans for moving into the cloud. Thanks for all the fish.