I ran 1% of Web Traffic in 2011 without running my own datacenter.
Our "platform" team was 6 people, two network engineers and four "devops" (Sysadmins that could write code, but were still called SysAdmins then).
We had two datacenters, one was SAVVIS in Winnersh Triangle, the other was in Santa-Clara USA.
We used remote hands- rarely- in the event that a cable died or a harddisk needed to be replaced, though such events are exceptionally rare even at the scale we had.
Mostly we would collect up failures and visit one day every 3 months.
Our "platform" team was 6 people, two network engineers and four "devops" (Sysadmins that could write code, but were still called SysAdmins then).
We had two datacenters, one was SAVVIS in Winnersh Triangle, the other was in Santa-Clara USA.
We used remote hands- rarely- in the event that a cable died or a harddisk needed to be replaced, though such events are exceptionally rare even at the scale we had.
Mostly we would collect up failures and visit one day every 3 months.