There's higher upfront costs, but typically we find that we are breakeven for the cost of hardware in 12 months or less. In my experience, colos will have techs available for hardware swaps / remote hands troubleshooting if needed. It's not free for that but it solves that problem. I think it really just depends on your company's needs and skillset. For our company it makes sense to colocate. We are a VOIP service provider, so we also have multiple IP transit providers and our own /22 subnet. We use BGP to change / pull routes quickly when there's outages with an ISP or cloud provider. I know AWS supports a setup like that, but you're relying on them for announcing route changes.
