>"I believe companies selling bare metal as a service are a happy compromise of cost and convenience, though." This is what I do. I rent bare metal from Hetzne

>"I believe companies selling bare metal as a service are a happy compromise of cost and convenience, though." This is what I do. I rent bare metal from Hetzner and OVH. I also have some hosting hardware right at my place. It saves me a ton of money and no I do not spend any meaningful time to administer. All done by a couple of shell scripts. I can re-create fresh service from the backup on a clean rented machine in no time. As for cloud - if I need to run some simulation once a month on some bazillion core computer then sure. Cloud makes much sense in this particular case. I am sure there are other cases that can be cost effective. Bot for the average business I believe cloud is a waste of resources and money.