[cookiecaper]

While I'm sure there are unique situations that for whatever bizarre reason work out where cloud is cheaper, they're pretty rare. Most of the time, if you have a server "on the other side of the world" you're in a data center where you can ask the datacenter's staff to install another disk for you and pay any associated fee. If you put it in a datacenter that doesn't offer such services and you're 5000 miles away, that was probably a bad call.

Cloud does have some benefits and there are specific applications that are smarter to run in the cloud than on colocated hardware, but they're almost never going to be cheaper to run in the cloud.

You can sometimes save money sort of indirectly. For example, if your MySQL application is struggling and you put it on Aurora and it runs fine there, then you've saved tons of labor costs in exchange for the cost of your Aurora instance, which isn't cheap, but is probably cheaper than consulting time, but even this is a short-lived benefit because at some point the monthly rent crosses the threshold, and it locks you into an application that can only run well on Amazon RDS.