"Server" is such a broad term. In our case, aside from cost as others already mentioned, the distance and latency is very important. The servers must be located

"Server" is such a broad term. In our case, aside from cost as others already mentioned, the distance and latency is very important. The servers must be located as close to client devices as possible and reasonable, and they are synced with clients using PTP to microseconds (depends on the actual distance and topology). Cloud is a no go, and we a using bare metal K8S for graceful handling of failures and updates.