Remote hands from co-lo facilities are typically free for simple activities like hitting a switch, plugging something in, etc. Hourly rates are extremely reasonable and initial racking is often included. Reality is if you’re using remote hands after the initial install you’re doing it wrong - out of band management, PXE boot to full machine bootstrap via ansible, K8, etc isn’t any more complicated than managing a bunch of VPCs, cloud firewalls, routing, cloud templates/terraform, etc.

Using Dell (as one example) you’d really be cheaping out on your hardware warranty if it didn’t include next day hardware replacement (for three/five years) and as I noted before, when placing server orders in the past they’ve discounted warranty/support to practically nothing. It’s actually fairly difficult to get a warranty that doesn’t include it. This is a level of support where the vendor literally dispatches someone to the facility who gets you back up and running. With redundant power supplies, RAID, etc the individual machine often doesn’t even go down and they just show up and replace the redundant component with the blinking light.

AWS is 20 years old and in two decades hardware has gotten EXTREMELY reliable and performant - in managing hundreds of servers across multiple facilities over the decades I can count the number of hardware failures on my fingers. The FUD/scare tactics/marketing of clouds to scare people away from hardware have been extremely effective. As one example for the most "unreliable" component the BackBlaze hard drive stats tell the story - they have a roughly 1% failure rate across > 100k consumer level mechanical drives[0] in service for a long as 92 months. These "failure prone" consumer drives aren't even available from server vendors. This is why their pricing is at least 1/10th that of big cloud.

VMware? Microsoft suite? For these kinds of applications I don’t know of anyone using anything other than containers, K8s, OpenStack, etc and Microsoft licensing is never “free” regardless of the approach. More traditional “enterprise applications” with a bunch of VMs that would necessitate something like VMware are essentially outside of scope and a different animal completely.

I also don’t know of any organizations outside of the smallest startups that don’t have at least one full time cloud devops/architect to manage anything beyond the simplest of cloud deployments. Compared to someone using an orchestration platform and managing a K8s control plane the employee cost is often a wash. For the rest of the dev/devops teams shipping a container is shipping a container.

The pricing differences at this scale are unbelievably dramatic (as noted in the article) - with ROI on hardware purchases (leases) and hosting vs cloud often less than one year. That’s A LOT of spend left over for the rounding error miscellaneous costs often noted. Cloud egress bandwidth pricing markups alone can pay for it when you’re pushing the kind of traffic that would warrant this approach.

I’ve been doing this since before AWS existed - the cloud has its place but in almost every case when this debate comes up arguments for “big cloud, always” typically come from people who have never deeply and holistically compared these approaches (and certainly never actually implemented “hardware”). For most of the "cloud only" generation their only experience with hardware is that time their laptop died and needless to say server grade hardware in temperature controlled facilities on conditioned power is infinitely more reliable than a consumer laptop getting thrown around.

Not saying that’s the case with you personally and “hardware, always” is just as inappropriate as “cloud, always” but to never even consider hardware and hosting in many cases results in wildly expensive cloud costs.

Don’t even get me started on cloud cost controls. The pricing is so dynamic and so obtuse there is an entire cottage industry of consultants and startups that exist solely to help orgs try to understand their cloud spend and attempt to optimize cost. Hardware leasing, fixed price co-lo, power, and bandwidth results in cost controls that just aren’t possible with cloud. Almost every startup has at least one story of scrambling to figure out what happened when they blow through their monthly cloud budget in many cases literally overnight - or begging their cloud provider to write off or steeply discount a monthly invoice that was wildly beyond predicted cost (and in many cases they literally wouldn't be able to pay).

In multiple rounds of investment, etc in startups I’ve often had the experience during technical and financial due-diligence where they look at hosting costs and literally can’t believe how cost effective and performant it is vs the “all cloud always” companies in their portfolio.

At a level of scale to even consider it hardware and co-lo is practically cheating.

[0] - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-202...