Depending on your regulatory environment, it can be cost-effective to not have to maintain your own data center with 24/7 security response, environmental monitoring, fire suppression systems, etc. (of course, the majority of businesses are probably not interested in things like SOC 2)
This argument comes up a lot, but it feels a bit silly to me. If you want a beefy server you start out with renting one. $150/month will give you a server with 24 core Xeon and 256GB of RAM, in a data center with everything you mentined plus a 24/7 hands-on technician you can book. Preferably rent two servers, because reliablity. Once you outgrow renting servers you start renting rack space in a certified data center with all the same amenities. Once you outgrow that you start renting entire racks, then rows of racks or small rooms inside the DC. Then you start renting portions of the DC. Once you have outgrown that you have to seriously worry about maintaining your own data center. But at that point you have so much scale that this will be the least of your worries
> This argument comes up a lot, but it feels a bit silly to me. If you want a beefy server you start out with renting one. $150/month will give you a server with 24 core Xeon and 256GB of RAM, in a data center with everything you mentined plus a 24/7 hands-on technician you can book.
What's the bandwidth and where can I rent one of these??
> Today at AWS, it is easily possible for people to spend a multiple of the cost of that hardware setup every month for far less compute power and storage.
suggesting to use a few beefy servers but if we are renting them from cloud we're back where we started.
The difference from the big clouds is that an equivalent instance at AWS costs 10x as much. If you go with few beefy servers AWS offers very little value for the money they charge, they only make sense for "cloud native" architectures. But if you rent raw servers from traditional hosters you can get prices much closer to the amortized costs of running them yourself, with the added convenience of having them in a certified data center with 24/7 security, backup power, etc.
If you want more control than that, colo is also pretty cheap [1]. But I'd consider that a step above what 95% of people need
For me the comparison was not against the specific instance of AWS but cloud in general, and AWS was a for instance. Which was the whole reason why I brought up compliance and stuff—it is much cheaper to have someone else handle that for you (even if it is hetzner!). That was my whole point.
IME, a cloud "core" is even worse than a hyperthread. I'm not sure if they oversubscribe, or underclock, or if it's virtualization overhead... but anyway, not great.
I'm a lot less concerned about CPU and ram and a lot more concerned about replicated object storage (across data centers). High end GPUs are also pretty important.
The only companies directly dealing with that type of stuff are the ones already at such a scale where they need to actually build their own data centers. Everyone else is just renting space somewhere that already takes care of those things and you just need to review their ISO/SOC reports.
This kind of argument comes from the cloud provider marketing playbook, not reality.
