Of course -- if you know your traffic well ahead of time. If you start growing quickly, it's not quite as simple. (And if you don't have the traffic/growth anti

Of course -- if you know your traffic well ahead of time. If you start growing quickly, it's not quite as simple. (And if you don't have the traffic/growth anticipated, you wasted a bunch of money). You also aren't accounting for redundancy. If the machine totally blows up, how quickly can you build another? Or do you spend +5k to have a second sitting as a standby? If the hardware does fail (whether it's a single drive in RAID or the whole system), who fixes it (or deals with getting it fixed)? For that matter, is the person who built or sourced the hardware's time worth $0? Cloud IS more expensive, but it's not as simple as comparing to the up-front cost of one piece of hardware.