Does it make sense to run your own hardware again? If you leased rackspace at a provider, you could just have tiny clusters of these everywhere for each service and pay virtually nothing. You could have it triple redundant and have it configured however you wanted.
Edit: it was a dif time, but wasnt that hiw google got started? Tgey just bought a ton of hardware.
Like http://www.pidramble.com/ - running in my basement right now, but it's comparable in performance (for many workloads) to a cluster of t2.micro instances.
Edit: it was a dif time, but wasnt that hiw google got started? Tgey just bought a ton of hardware.