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Where did the servers go when our server room became a broom closet?

jordan_ellis2ActivePRO6
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Day job moved offices in the fall. Old place had a server room with a glass door, a rack, its own little wall mounted air conditioner that dripped, and a sign nobody obeyed about propping the door. New place has a closet with a network switch, a battery backup the size of a shoebox, and shelves of printer paper.

I asked our IT guy where all the machines went and he looked at me like I'd asked where the mail goes. Everything's hosted. The email, the accounting system, the files, all of it lives in somebody else's building now, and we pay monthly for it. He named the region it sits in, which is apparently a place, some cluster of buildings a few states away that I'll never lay eyes on.

I've been reading real estate for six months and it never clicked that our IT bill is rent. Not our rent, but rent, going to whoever owns those buildings, and the reason we could shrink our office square footage is that our computing moved into somebody else's.

So now I understand why every article says this is the most in demand property type going. I still can't buy one. I couldn't buy a tenth of one. But my mental map of the industry got a new box on it this week and it happened because of a broom closet.

5 replies

luis_carreraGet yours
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Same realization hit me through my own subscriptions. I pay four companies monthly for software and every one of them is paying somebody for space and power. It's rent all the way down.

marcus_hale41CG4A
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The distinction to hold onto, pike, is that most of that spend goes to the operator running the service, and the operator either owns its facility or leases from a landlord. Owning the landlord and owning the operator are very different investments with very different risk. The passive route people here actually take is the public shares.

aliyah_bAU2APRO6
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pike, your closet story is more concrete than the last three explainers I read. I'm still working out what my first small deal costs and this has nothing to do with it, but I liked it.

angela_burkeServicePRO6
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That dripping wall unit in the old room is exactly the failure mode that pushed everybody to hosted. I've replaced two of those for clients and both times the real cost was the day the office couldn't work.