> keeping it running 24/7 involves substantial costs So does using a cloud service. It's not actually obvious, conceptually, but very little of the admin overh

> keeping it running 24/7 involves substantial costs So does using a cloud service. It's not actually obvious, conceptually, but very little of the admin overhead has to do with the "own hardware" aspect of running it, especially if one excludes anything that has a direct analog at a cloud service. There certainly exist services that abstract away more of this, but that's in exchange for higher cost and lower top performance, but that doesn't scale (in terms of cost). > Sure, if you run a solo operation, you can just get up during the night to nurse your server, but at some point that no longer makes sense to do. I'd actually argue the reverse. My experience is that the own-hardware portion took at most a quarter of my time, and that remained constant up to several hundred servers. It's much cheaper per unit of infrastructure the more units you have. The tools and procedures that allow that kind of efficiency were the prerequisite for cloud services to exist.