If you want to own a server, rather than essentially renting one, then Superb Internet, one of the pioneering web hosting and domain registrar companies, might have something you’ll be interested in.

The company recently announced that it is making its lease-to-own program available for all of its dedicated servers. Customers simply pay a monthly leasing fee for 12 months. After the payments are completed, they own the server, and merely pay a colocation fee.

Superb Internet has created a special section for this new service, where the company states that “[a]fter 12 months on our lease-to-own program, you own your server and your monthly colocation starts at just $99 per month.” The servers are located at Tier 4 datacenters, according to Superb Internet’s web site.

According to the web site, a customer simply adds approximately $25.00 per month (depending on the hardware configuration) to the monthly price of their server, which currently ranges from $69 to $349, and after 12 months they are the proud owner of a server.

This program seems to be an easy way for someone to advance to server ownership, and given that this offer comes from one of the oldest hosting companies to still exist to this day, customers should feel at ease availing themselves of this offer. But is it everything that it’s cracked up to be?

The company doesn’t make it clear on its web site who’s responsible for repairs during the lease period, and the inference is that repairs are the owner’s responsibility once the lease period is up. If that’s the case, will Superb Internet offer a sort of “remote hands” service to address repair issues, and if so, how much extra would that cost? One advantage of renting a dedicated server is that the hosting company typically handles repair issues. That would go away, typically, once they no longer own the server.

While server ownership sounds nice, with ownership comes greater responsibility. And as such, customers have to ask themselves whether they need to own the equipment in the first place. Will owning your own machine benefit your business ROI in the long run, especially that after the lease period has run out, there are still colocation fees to be paid? Do you have the skills and resources to manage the server? They are correct when they say “it’s a beautiful thing” in regards to owning a server, but they fail to address key issues. While this isn’t a bad thing in itself, these are the sorts of things that one needs to consider before jumping into server ownership.