Spec Your Own Hardware to Colocate?

We've got a wide breadth of admins on here covering a pretty good gambit of hosting solutions. I am suspecting thought that most are on shared and/or VPS, with Dedicated quite small.

I have no numbers to support that, just my own feel from the AA site.

Aside from that, I was curious if any of you have considered owning your own hardware such that you collocate.


If you are currently operating this way, then please be kind to share the following:

1. General System Specs (OS, CPU, RAM, mobo, how many Us)

2. Number of sites running

3. Notable applications being used or served.

4. DataCenter and your ~monthly cost


If you happen to be considering this option, then please be kind and share how you are going about it:

1. Systems you are considering and from home (e.g, NewEgg)

2. Number of anticipated sites

3. Notable applications intended

4. Candidate Datacenter and ~monthly cost



In all of this, I'm assuming unmanaged still b/c datacenters can still offer that service on your own hardware. However, please note if managed is a part of your situation.

Part of my inquiry to this is that owning your own equipment is somewhat beneficial b/c you can setup everything at home, for the most part. Drop in the beast, flip a bit of switches, test the security etc. and let 'er rip. There are obvious pros/cons to this which is more geared to someone with the know how and time to do the upfront configurations and such. Biggest pro for me though about all this is just complete ownership of what is on the box. Not copied to a host, that theoretically may never be deleted, even after your account is long gone. I'm not terribly concerned about that...yet, but its just a thought. So I'm curious about you all on this.

Thanks to anyone's input.