[elchief]

It makes sense if you need to spin up several servers really fast. Like, "I can't wait 2 weeks for my Supermicro reseller to ship and build them" fast.

There is likely some optimal schedule where you start w cloud, order DIY replacements, and migrate, and repeat as you scale. Labour-intensive though.

[dpark]

Labor isn't cheap. If you spend more on labor to manage this shuffling than you save on cloud costs, it's decidedly suboptimal.

[kuschku]

In that case, rent a dedicated server from Hetzner or OVH, it’s online in 120 seconds, and still 5 times cheaper than AWS.