Exactly. If you work for 100$ an hour, which would be on the cheap side for skilled devops people and you put a 100 hours in to move a lot of servers offline; t

Exactly. If you work for 100$ an hour, which would be on the cheap side for skilled devops people and you put a 100 hours in to move a lot of servers offline; that's going to cost 10K$. That would be a small project. A bit over two weeks for a single person. Then add support, regular maintenance, etc. And it starts adding up more cost. And to get to 24x7 uptime, you need skilled people on stand by all the time. All that at 100$/hour/person. That's a lot of cost that you need to factor into your calculations. Mostly it doesn't make sense for small companies to be doing this. With many companies, the realistic cost of moving off cloud in labor would be higher than years of cumulative bills for cloud hosting. Even if you don't value your own time, you might want to consider doing something more valuable with it than devops.