See, it might make sense not hiring a sysadmin who will work on your physical servers in the datacenter if it's about paying $500 to AWS monthly vs $100 to the

See, it might make sense not hiring a sysadmin who will work on your physical servers in the datacenter if it's about paying $500 to AWS monthly vs $100 to the datacenter - coz the salary is say $5000 a month. But if the startup plans to stay on that level forever, they better not even start. And pretty soon you'll find yourself paying $20000 per month (very practical thing in a still small startup i know) vs $4000, turning situation around - and going off cloud while being live may be a painful transition. (yes you get discounts on large volumes in the cloud, but so do you in the datacenters - you can for example rent whole rack which is a lot cheaper than doing it per-server).