On purchase price alone you are usually better off not renting. Given a server generally comes with 5 years warranty, you are about 50% better off on those fig

On purchase price alone you are usually better off not renting. Given a server generally comes with 5 years warranty, you are about 50% better off on those figures. However, the killer isn't the purchase price. You have to put it somewhere with a lot of bandwidth, UPS, generators and cooling. To use your Hetzner example, you can't get co-lo for less than $119. That's 14U, which is more than you need for one server of course, but then there are usually charges on top of that. So yes, for small installations it's hard to beat renting. You need to be using several racks for the equation to tilt towards purchase.