[chx]

Not on site, no, renting them from some big provider. The advantages are huge: if the magic smoke gets released getting a replacement on line is Someone Else's (TM) problem. If you find you need to grow, you release the one you rented into the pool and the provider will be able to rent it to the next schmuck. EC2 bare metal is very expensive. In general, I am very cloud skeptic. I found the bare metal being a much better price/value for almost all websites. People are writing these complex apps that scale across database clusters and I am like... YAGNI. One database server (or a two for a hot spare) and maybe separate few web frontends is almost always enough.

[hobls]

I’m sure that makes plenty of sense for many applications! I’m very fond of some of the benefits of cloud infrastructure, but I’m sure you’ve heard the pitch.