At the very lowest end, colocation is a clear winner in value, even up to a few servers, it stands up well. Once you have multiple servers, and need to start l

At the very lowest end, colocation is a clear winner in value, even up to a few servers, it stands up well. Once you have multiple servers, and need to start load-balancing some sets of servers to deal with load spikes, cloud-based infrastructure starts to have some benefits that make it competitive and possible cheaper in some instances, because of load scaling and ease of turn-up of new systems. If you're increasing load by 20% or more a month, you likely will have major problems provisioning servers fast enough unless you gamble that trend will increase for a year or more and make a much larger investment than your normal monthly spend to account for it up front. Once you get really large though you can actually just colocate a bunch of systems and storage and throw a hypervisor manager on them and get almost all the benefits of a cloud based system for an up-front cost that's probably not much more than a dew months of your cloud costs (it looks like 3-4 months is the break-even on some large AWS instances I just looked at compared to some 64-core/512GB boxes I specced out recently). You won't be able to scale quite as immediately to large load increases unless you under-provision, but at that point you're large enough that you should have a handle on what your load spikes are like, and maybe even be able to supplement with could offerings in a pinch. In a way, cloud-based offerings allow medium-to-large businesses to have a sort of insurance on scaling, in that they are paying more for it, but they can stop at the right amount for their need or even back-off because of problems (or engineering coming up with a better way to handle some load).