> This argument comes up a lot, but it feels a bit silly to me. If you want a beefy server you start out with renting one. $150/month will give you a server with 24 core Xeon and 256GB of RAM, in a data center with everything you mentined plus a 24/7 hands-on technician you can book.
What's the bandwidth and where can I rent one of these??
> Today at AWS, it is easily possible for people to spend a multiple of the cost of that hardware setup every month for far less compute power and storage.
suggesting to use a few beefy servers but if we are renting them from cloud we're back where we started.
The difference from the big clouds is that an equivalent instance at AWS costs 10x as much. If you go with few beefy servers AWS offers very little value for the money they charge, they only make sense for "cloud native" architectures. But if you rent raw servers from traditional hosters you can get prices much closer to the amortized costs of running them yourself, with the added convenience of having them in a certified data center with 24/7 security, backup power, etc.
If you want more control than that, colo is also pretty cheap [1]. But I'd consider that a step above what 95% of people need
For me the comparison was not against the specific instance of AWS but cloud in general, and AWS was a for instance. Which was the whole reason why I brought up compliance and stuff—it is much cheaper to have someone else handle that for you (even if it is hetzner!). That was my whole point.
IME, a cloud "core" is even worse than a hyperthread. I'm not sure if they oversubscribe, or underclock, or if it's virtualization overhead... but anyway, not great.
What's the bandwidth and where can I rent one of these??