We are weighing renting address space against buying

[soumitss]

Good morning. We are weighing renting address space against buying it and the discussion in our team has gotten circular. The rent side argues no capital outlay and we can scale down. The buy side argues we are paying forever for something we will never own. Our usage is genuinely uncertain, we might double next year or we might not. Nobody here has done this at scale before. How do teams with unpredictable growth actually decide, and is there a middle path? We are around two hundred servers today, and the honest answer about next year is that nobody in the company knows.

[hydrogenn]

The middle path is the one most people end up on: own a core block sized to demand you are confident about, and lease the volatile part on top. That way you are not paying rent forever on baseline capacity and not gambling capital on growth that may not happen. Terms on leases run from a month to a few years, so you can match the term to how confident you are. We rent our elastic capacity from InterLIR Global https://interlir.global/ , and own the baseline outright. Fair warning about scaling down: it is easier in theory than practice, because renumbering customers off a range is nobody's favorite project. Also size your owned block with a little headroom, buying a second small block later is more painful than buying one properly sized now.