Do big sites like hi5.com and myspace.com rent servers r buy em?

do sites like hi5.com and myspace.com rent there servers from datacenters and keep there servers there, or do they buy there servers and run them from an office or there own building?

Do big sites like hi5.com and myspace.com rent servers r buy em?
I know hi5 owns their own servers, but there are so many servers they are located at a datacenter, not in the main office. I suspect Myspace does the same, since owning your own servers is cheaper than renting them.
Reply:They might buy them because rent would be way too much for all their servers needed.
Reply:Many major sites do neither - they own their own servers but co-locate in datacenters.





A manufacturing company that engages in e-commerce may have their computers in their own building, because their website is tightly coupled to the databases they use to control production and keep track of inventory. The problem with this is that you're on an internet back street, and the extra hops that users require to get to the site adds latency and slows down the site quite a bit.





Most sites choose to be in major datacenters, because of the great connectivity they have. My servers (five of them) are just one hop from seven major internet backbones.





The economics are great, too. Everyone wants to peer with the largest ISPs, largest datacenters, etc., in order to reduce the number of hops (and thus latency) involved. If Joe's Dating Site wants to set up their own datacenter (datingcenter? grin;), Joe will pay a fortune to connect with anyone because he wants them FAR more than they want him. If he attracts 500,000 other sites to his datacenter, though, he'll start to get paid instead of paying.





There are a number of reasons to buy computers rather than leasing. One is that your hardware options are unlimited. If your site generates custom graphics "on the fly", you want multiple really-fast CPUs. If you deliver videos such as YouTube does, you need a really fast disk subsystem, but you don't need much in the way of CPUs. You may need a hardware firewall, or perhaps you need a strange setup with Linux, Windows and Mac servers all working together because of the mashup your site relies on.





But that's also a hassle. If something goes wrong with the hardware, you're probably going to have to fix it yourself, and datacenters really don't like visitors. They have locked facilities and security guards to keep people out. If you need access to your server, security is a bigger problem, so co-location is considerably more expensive.





The vast majority of sites - even big ones - are served most economically by leased servers in major datacenters. The combination of computer plus software plus bandwidth, typically rents for less than either the bandwidth or the co-location rent for having a server you own. For startups, this is even more important because scaling up with more servers doesn't require large capital outlays or long lead times; often servers can be provisioned within minutes or hours.








Of course, there are the kids who sell $3 hosting on the computer in the den, running it off Mom and Dad's cable modem. They don't realize that while they can download at 6mbps, they can only upload at 256kbps - and their uploads are their customers' users' downloads, so the site runs slow, even when there is only one user visiting one site at a time. These outfits count as "own their own server, in their own datacenter" too. They don't seem to stick around long - they tend to pull the plug and disappear without notice at the first technical problem they run into - but given the endless supply of hopeful idiots in the world, there are quite a few of them out there at any given time.