> Last time someone had to perform hardware maintenance was at least 3 months ago. If you're small enough (20-30 servers for us) the things mostly run themselves.
If those servers are production servers, I'd say that's not small--you're already scaled to the point where you have hired a whole person (or two) to do server work, no?
I've worked at places where I'm the only technical person. I know enough to set up a Django server, but the reality is I'm not an IT guy, I'm a developer. Paying for a few cloud servers means we don't have to hire anyone to do server maintenance, which gives me an entire person's salary as a server budget before we have to consider whether hiring a person would be better. A lot of companies never reach the size where that becomes a concern.
Of course everybody wants to get big enough that they need a server farm, but as long as you don't vendor-lock yourself, moving from a virtual Linux server on the cloud to a physical server in a colo center is fairly trivial.
My personal website has been running on a single $10/mo Digital Ocean server for 5 years. I think it would be very difficult to beat that price with a colo center and physical hardware. Most businesses are obviously larger than that, but I think it's a bit of an overreach to claim that it's always more expensive to run on the cloud. It just isn't, for many real-life situations.
If those servers are production servers, I'd say that's not small--you're already scaled to the point where you have hired a whole person (or two) to do server work, no?
I've worked at places where I'm the only technical person. I know enough to set up a Django server, but the reality is I'm not an IT guy, I'm a developer. Paying for a few cloud servers means we don't have to hire anyone to do server maintenance, which gives me an entire person's salary as a server budget before we have to consider whether hiring a person would be better. A lot of companies never reach the size where that becomes a concern.
Of course everybody wants to get big enough that they need a server farm, but as long as you don't vendor-lock yourself, moving from a virtual Linux server on the cloud to a physical server in a colo center is fairly trivial.
My personal website has been running on a single $10/mo Digital Ocean server for 5 years. I think it would be very difficult to beat that price with a colo center and physical hardware. Most businesses are obviously larger than that, but I think it's a bit of an overreach to claim that it's always more expensive to run on the cloud. It just isn't, for many real-life situations.