[ascorbic]

Are you also assuming the datacenter is free too, or are you planning to keep this in a closet? I hope you have HVAC too. And who is going to monitor this hardware? Who is going to assemble it? And sure the components are under warranty, but what happens when it breaks? Do you need to keep hot spares, or are you happy to wait for a replacement to be shipped out? I'm assuming you know instantly what the problem is too? Compare with the cloud version where you can have a new instance up and running in seconds.

I don't know about you, but I can remember the situation 15 years ago as a new startup where a problem with a server meant driving to the datacenter. I can tell you, paying more for a EC2 instance was the definition of a no-brainer.