You have to run the numbers for your specific company, expected scaling behavior, compute work load, and expected system administration overhead and compare all

You have to run the numbers for your specific company, expected scaling behavior, compute work load, and expected system administration overhead and compare all scenarios. I will say that if your work load is relatively fixed in magnitude and especially if it's bandwidth intensive, you can probably beat the "big cloud" providers by at least an order of magnitude. If it's extremely bandwidth intensive you should never consider mainstream cloud as outbound bandwidth is absurdly overpriced... like 1000% markup or even more. I can't exaggerate how insane bandwidth pricing is. If you are just prototyping something, your work load is highly elastic, or your product is rapidly evolving, the flexibility and outsourced sysadmin of cloud will probably make sense. Edit: There are edge cases too. If your work load is, say, inbound bandwidth and storage intensive, AWS might be great since S3 is cheap and inbound bandwidth is free. Just keep in mind that you might pay a lot for egress if you ever need that data out. Will you? Run your own numbers and be detailed!