cloud will always be more expensive than bare metal. period. cloud is great to start out when you have no clue about how much power you will need to satisfy your customers and to be flexible enough to cover some unexpected spikes. but once you're out there earning, the only reason to stay on cloud is comfort. business-wise it is a black hole for money. many will argue that cost of personnel to manage your own infra does not favour it over cloud. but if you do the math you will see that savings when renting only three bare metal servers each month will pay a full-time salary for a sysadmin. you don't even need to own your own hardware. the bare metal rentals these days are insanely low and if you truly want to save each penny, you buy your own because in a matter of months you get yor investment back on saved fees alone. the thing is that these big tech companies convinced so many people these days that cloud is the only way that they cannot even fathom how anybody can run on their own hardware. the new sysadmins are already "brainwashed" and inexperienced this way and the old school guys that have experienced managing their own hardware are slowly "dying" out. soon, just a mention of managing your own hardware will become a joke to these newcommers when in reality the cloud was never-ever a cheaper option to go with in the first place. not to mention that these days we have so much technology to make things easy(kubernetes, rancher, proxmox, docker, lxc..) that it is quite laugable to fear bare metal and religiously praise the cloud like some kind of savior.