The reason to use services like AWS is that you can scale in the opposite direction too - provisioning cheap infra for $10s - $100s a month. That's something yo

The reason to use services like AWS is that you can scale in the opposite direction too - provisioning cheap infra for $10s - $100s a month. That's something your hypothetical(?) startup should consider doing, depending of course on what they are doing with all that hardware.