For me, I would not consider buying physical servers for quite a long time. That's coming from someone who has quite a bit of experience working with hardware.

For me, I would not consider buying physical servers for quite a long time. That's coming from someone who has quite a bit of experience working with hardware. If you shipped me a box of parts that would be just as well as a physical server. It's just the time / maintenance / cost that goes with that. On the other hand, there is also that growth tipping point where cloud is not cost effective anymore and you need to switch to physical servers, or at least it would be a cost savings doing so. That's quite a while later though save for some niche cases. One interesting lane might be to combine these two and offer a one stop service for getting cloud servers and hardware. In particular you could offer guidence (automated or otherwise) about when it makes the most sense to use cloud or onprem at what scale. Scope could also include things like colo vs self hosting, What datacenters to use, where to buy land to build new datacenters, region and cdn consideration, etc.