For one reason, if you only need the one system, you almost certainly need to compare the cost to owning and maintaining two. If you can't tolerate the server

For one reason, if you only need the one system, you almost certainly need to compare the cost to owning and maintaining two. If you can't tolerate the server being down for more than the lead time it takes to get a new one, you need to already have one on standby. The lead time is probably at least a couple weeks, but there's no guarantees since you're depending on vendor availability and hundreds of other things out of your control. Depending on what you're running on it, you'll also probably want to test software upgrades and have fallback plans when you deploy. The thing the "cloud" version gets you is zero lead time, along with the ability to spin up a second instance (or ten, if you want) while you deploy a new version or just want to do some testing.