Can anyone give me a quote on how much it will cost to start my own small datacenter?

Where i am at the moment we have well into the 000's of server running off a primary trunk (costing around 25k AUD p/m), the load on the link is well below 60% at our busiest times and if you did the math based on our client count (between 9500 and 10000 at the moment) then....

9500 x avg ticket $50AUD = $475,000~ ish p/month in revenue.

And since we are in Aust, that still pays for everyone's wages and the director's fetishes with cars.

Edit: This is info on my current employer, not my own operations.

 

Had an example just this evening. Building codes are notoriously lax here, and people just sort of do whatever they want - a little "tea money" to the inspector and it's all cool.

Tonight I was walking home and passed a restaurant where I eat a couple times a week. Whoops, where was it? Flat as a pancake. Turns out they were doing some "renovations" in the building next door and managed to weaken the shared wall between them. After, thankfully, enough audible warning for everyone to clear out, the wall gave way and the restaurant's roof - itself almost certainly not up to code - collapsed.

If not a collapsing wall, it could be a fire, a water pipe break, or anything else you could imagine. Good luck getting insurance that will cover your servers in a residential property. And even if you get it, what happens to your business when everyone's offline for two weeks while you try to get the power hooked up again?

Things are cheaper and more casual and I love it here, but there's definitely a different sort of cost to it. Don't have any illusions. Come to Asia for the lifestyle, the food, the people, the weather, the scenery, the beaches, the wildlife. But if you're not engaged in a business where you can recover your capital costs very quickly, don't come out of cheapness.