can you explain the math? I honestly don't have a working knoweldge of the inputs, but let's say i wanted the equivalent of ec2? How would I go about setting it

can you explain the math? I honestly don't have a working knoweldge of the inputs, but let's say i wanted the equivalent of ec2? How would I go about setting it up and the costs? If I wanted to serve a few million english speaking people my web application, how coud I calculate the price? Do I literally buy my own hardware, or I rent hardware at a dedicated rate? These are real questions btw, not rhetoric, it's hard to find a solid blog post or comparison of setting this up and the long term cost v convenience benefits of scaling this because almost everyone uses cloud providers, and by cloud providers I mean digital ocean, AWS, azure, rackspace or now google. Heroku (last I checked) sits on AWS as well and maybe even ngineyard does. actually pretty curious now if a few million people would be worth running your own gear, and if running that gear was lease v buy