[waivej]

I priced out some servers and cloud providers. It appears that the "cloud" servers are about 30% more expensive. Though the gap widens when you start building bigger machines (32G RAM, latest processors, etc.) EDIT: I'm looking at 2-16G machines.

On the other hand, in my case the extra capacity would sit idle for a while. (I replace servers every 3 years.) Going with a cloud platform, I would have likely upgraded a few times and taken on less risk.

The cool thing about cloud hosting is that you can always switch to owning your own hardware if it will save you money. It's much harder to go the other way.

Also, once you try to shore up risks and add things like drive snapshots, the costs get much closer. (ie: start using all of the features offered by Amazon AWS.)

[lsc]

how much do you pay for servers? 'cause I'd be out of business if the difference between amortised hardware cost and what i charged you was 30%