I was talking about dedicated servers, not running your data centre. Data centres are a scale business but cheap to run at reasonable scale. Dedicated servers a

I was talking about dedicated servers, not running your data centre. Data centres are a scale business but cheap to run at reasonable scale. Dedicated servers are significantly cheaper than cloud instances and there's not much more to monitor than for the cloud. Compared to hosted DB clusters you need someone to set it up and run it but you'd also need an AWS expert for a production cluster in the cloud.