HE's FMT2 is a hellhole of a "data center" if ever there was one.

As someone who has equipment there, I agree. Its not a datacenter. However the pricing is not bad, so its a real get what you pay for.

He did say that he believes it's better to host in two cheap places than one expensive one....

Aside: back in the early days, a lot of YC startups hosted at HE. I think it was one of the first JTV colos, actually.

Disagree. Twice the headache. Put all your eggs in one basket then watch that basket. Get bigger, repeat. I'd go from 2 to 3 faster than 1 to 2.

I don't think he was making an argument for ease of maintenance, but rather, reliability per dollar. Even if you've got two crappy datacenters, you're at least redundantly crappy.

That only works if you value sysadmin time at $0/hr.

You need a capable sysadmin anyways. It makes sense to pay her/him to design and scale your "platform" properly, especially if you're making any money from it.

this is only useful for clients who aren't running their own switches & bgp. if they are running their own network, they can peer with ISPs that don't have physical locations in their dns names. this is a thing you can request, for obvious reasons.