or just lease servers from a "dedicated hosting" company. you get all the benefits of a colocated server (customizability, security, performance) and you can let them deal with hardware failures, upgrades, and obsolescence.
Even this grows into a nightmare. I've been moving dedicated servers to cloud / virtual solutions for the last 4 months.
I'm in love with Rackspace Cloud stuff and their support, and will end up saving thousands while providing my clients with a state of the art email system and more redundancy. Plus, with their cloud servers I can replicate and backup easily.
you didn't explain how it "grows into a nightmare". just pricing or what? i just used rackspace's pricing tool to price out what a virtual server would cost with the same amount of ram and bandwidth i get from one of my dedicated servers; the cloud solution was about $40/month higher.
