I transitioned from VPS to rented dedicated servers years ago which was significantly more cost effective.

I recommend if you do this to try to keep your stack as portable as possible, it was relatively easy for me since I was already using Docker and started testing Rancher/K8s on the dedicated servers. This was years ago and I'm fully committed to K8s at this point.

This year I actually took it a step further and ended up just building a little 4U server that I colocated at a smaller data center that I was already renting dedicated servers from. I needed this for high data volume and latency needed to be as minimal as possible (CPU and storage together) while keeping recurring costs minimal.

For your questions:

> Has anyone done this and what was your experience? Relatively straight forward, a lot of up-front cost but has been overall about the same/breaking even with higher performance / results. I went with one that allowed me to rent IPv4 addresses without doing any peering or extra work, essentially just supply the computer, set it up, and let it go.

> How do you select a colo and what do you look for? For me, cost and latency. I've been looking into colocating another server in Asia but haven't had a lot of luck picking a specific data center yet.

> How do you manage the hardware and how much savings in time/$ is there really? Honestly, management has been pretty minimal. My server was entirely new so nothing has broken, I just keep tabs on it every couple weeks and make sure my ZFS storage hasn't turned unhealthy.

For some absolute numbers for you, my server specs and cost: 4U Colocated 4x 8TB HGST HDD ( Setup with RAID10 essentially, so 16TB usable space ) 2x 2TB NVMe SSD ( One actually isn't used currently, but is in the slot and available ) AMD Ryzen 9 ( 32 threads / 16 cores ) 4x 32gb G.Skill ram ( 128gb )

I also have a spare 256GB Samsung 2.5in SSD on standby (literally in the case, just unplugged) in-case something happens to the NVMe drives.

All-in, up-front was around $4k USD, monthly is $95 USD (all costs included), and I really only need to check on it every now and then and let Rancher/K8s take it from there. Previous costs were around $200-300/mo for a few different dedicated servers and S3 storage.

There have been incidents at the data center I went with which is definitely something you'd need to plan for, the one I went with seems to average 1 incident every 1-2 years. There was an incident a couple months ago at the data center (power outage), something happened with my server which actually required re-formatting the NVMe drives and re-setting up everything over the data center's supplied portable IPMI-ish interface, which required them to schedule a time to hook it up and then use it. Not every data center will have this or be as cooperative about it.

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I'd definitely caution jumping over to colocation, start with renting dedicated servers at the very least.