> It was much more common to over provision and have machines and bandwidth being unused for years. But the overprovisioned server might still be a lot cheaper

> It was much more common to over provision and have machines and bandwidth being unused for years. But the overprovisioned server might still be a lot cheaper than the cloud bill. It can be totally reasonable to have a server running at 1-5% load 98% of the time if you really need the capacity for the remaining 2%. Also, neither "scaling up" as in "re-deploying the same setup on a beefier instance" nor "scaling out" as in "let's expand to the US and have a server there" is too difficult if the setup is automated (Ansible).