Buying or renting
The comparison people make is the purchase price against thirty-six months of rent. That comparison leaves out most of the cost.
What renting includes that buying does not
- Replacement parts, held on site, fitted by our engineers, at no extra charge — see hardware failure.
- The risk of a dead machine. If a board fails in month thirty, that is our problem, not a purchase order.
- Flexibility. More memory, a faster port, a different specification — a ticket rather than procurement.
- No depreciation to manage, and no pile of four-year-old hardware to dispose of.
What buying includes that renting does not
- A lower monthly cost at scale, once the capital is spent.
- Exactly the hardware you want, including things nobody rents.
- An asset on the balance sheet, if that matters to your accounting.
The costs people leave out
- Spares
- Budget 10–15% on top for spare disks, memory and a power supply. Without them a failure is a courier delay, not a swap.
- Your own time
- Specifying, ordering, receiving, racking, and dealing with RMAs. Count it at what your hours are worth.
- The useful life
- Four to five years for most workloads, less if you are chasing single-thread performance. After that you are maintaining hardware you would not buy.
- Residual value
- Close to nothing, and disposal has its own cost and its own data-destruction obligation.
Where the crossover sits
Roughly: below a handful of machines, renting wins on nearly every axis. Between five and twenty it depends on how standard your hardware is and whether you have someone whose job this already is. Above that, owning usually wins on cost and you are buying a maintenance function with it.
The exception that overrides the arithmetic: if a failure at three in the morning would cost you more than the hardware, rent. The replacement is already in the building.
You do not have to choose once
Rent while you are finding out what the workload needs, buy once the specification has stopped moving, and colocate the bought machines alongside the rented ones. Same rack, same network — see colocation or a dedicated server.
If you do buy, agree the spares arrangement before the hardware ships, and read shipping hardware to us first — deliveries without an agreed ticket reference are refused at the door.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base