Servers: lease vs buy - what considerations to take?

Question

_{^{This is different from a previous question.}}

When preparing to replace/upgrade hardware, what benefits/considerations should be taken on leasing the equipment vs buying it?

Some advantages I've seen:

Leasing

• the vendor is responsible if something goes "wrong"
• fixed monthly expenses

Buying

• the equipment is "mine"
• one-time cost can be depreciated for accounting purposes

Some disadvantages

Leasing

• have to replace equipment or renew the lease at the end of the term
• over the life of the lease, total cost is higher than the initial cost of buying

Buying

• all maintenance is our responsibility (outside of support-contract coverages)
• tracking the life of the equipment could be more difficult

What other considerations should there be?

Answer 1

It depends more on what your using it for.

For instance, many of our clients have a Backup Disaster Recovery plan through us. We lease these servers out since the software is ours and we maintain everything about it.

The same clients, however, have SBS servers, file servers etc. which are better for them to own since everything about it is theirs.

Typically, I would say if you own all the software, you should own the server too.