> The costs of hosting your own computers has often increased. Cloud costs, so far, have only gone down. If that's true, it's only true because cloud pricing w

> The costs of hosting your own computers has often increased. Cloud costs, so far, have only gone down. If that's true, it's only true because cloud pricing was highway robbery to begin with. Hurricane Electric (who I chose simply because they always put their price online--other colos should take note) is at $400/month for a cab & GigE. It doesn't take very many online servers to put that in a rounding error. In roughly 20 months, you win against the cloud even if you count CapEx. And, do remember, the cloud companies all charge egress by the byte. Sure, most people don't care, until they become successful and suddenly wind up with a $10K bill in a month. The "cloud" is useful two ways: 1) Pop up servers quickly However, this is should be "I use servers and can transfer them to another provider quickly if I need to." Any provider should work as well as bare metal. 2) Lean heavily into specific services on in the cloud provider. The goal here is that you are cheaper specifically because you don't have a fixed "baseline" that you are always utilizing. In this way, you are completely relying on the fact that the provider can shuffle things to be uber cheap.