Money Saving Tip: Lease-to-Own Servers

My ISP starting offering lease-to-own deals many years ago on dedicated servers.  At the time, you would pay an extra $25/month or so to sign-up.  Then after a year, your payment would get prorated down, and after two years you would own the server out-right.

I didn't really think much of the long term benefit of it at the time since I was swapping up my servers so often in the early days to account for increasing traffic and new sites I was adding each year.

Well come to find out my 2 years had come and gone this past summer.  I was doing some catching up on my books and realized my develoment server, which I was paying around $70/month for for 2 years, was now billing out at $2/month!  Nice!  I had completelyl forgotten about the lease-to-own program.  My server was essentially free from here on out!  The $2/month they charge me now is for the additional IP addresses I lease, unrelated to the hardware.

Since this is my development box, I can estimate keeping it for another 3+ years before it probably dies on me...  That will pocket me a total savings of $2520!

As an added benefit, my ISP will ship me the server once I terminate our contract, or upgrade to a new server.  It is my server!   Sweet!  

For my business I lease a few dedicated servers.   I have another one approaching the 2-year limit next month.  That one I pay close to $300/month for.  Once my hardware portion of that payment is reduced, I'll be paying less than $50/month for the server.  Assuming I hang on to it for another 2 years (possible, since I recently implemented a sweet memcached solution to help scale my server), that would give me a total savings of $6000 for this second server alone!

Between the two servers, I'm going to save $8500+ over the next few years.  Plus I'll get the servers sent to me to keep as nostalgia... ;-)