At that lower end you get two of these machines, https://www.hetzner.com/sb/#price_from=100 https://www.hetzner.com/sb/#price_from=100, plus another hundred buc

At that lower end you get two of these machines, https://www.hetzner.com/sb/#price_from=100 https://www.hetzner.com/sb/#price_from=100, plus another hundred bucks per month for fun and CDN and some DDOS protection if that's your thing and a backup solution. Pick a 256 GB RAM machine and one with 3-4 TB SSD. It'll reliably cost exactly that and you'll be able to handle quite a lot of traffic. Probably enough that the same load would land you around 3k/month on AWS or GCP or whatever. For 3k/month you can get hundreds of cores and 1-2 TB RAM on a couple of machines physically separated in a redundant data center setup. That's with markup from the data center selling it to you and the credit cost. After two-three years you own the hardware and can sell it if you want. A rig like this makes it rather easy to build HA-systems, have your devs experiment a bit with Ansible and keepalived and ProxySQL and they'll figure it out. The beauty of Unix-like systems is that they're trivially discoverable and well documented. The clown platforms are not, and if your systems go down for whatever reason it's typically much harder and more labour intensive to get them back up again when they're clowned. This is especially the case if they get transfered to new management, e.g. due to bankruptcy proceedings. Paying a premium to get locked-in is a bad deal, unless you're the kind of organisation that is likely to also have mainframes in production.