[tcbyrd]

I haven't personally done detailed cost analysis lately, but if you have systems that regularly operate at 80+% of capacity, I can't see how the operating costs of any cloud operator can be cheaper than operating it yourself. Their whole pricing model is based on being able to over-provision compute and move workloads around within a datacenter. As much as people talk about failing hard drives and other components at scale, failure rates are still low enough that you could operate dozens of systems at full capacity for 3+ years with maybe a handful of legit hardware failures. To rent that same compute from any cloud provider would cost significantly more. The cheapest "Dedicated Host" on AWS will cost you almost $12k over 3 years if you pay for it on-demand, and it's equivalent in specs to something you can buy for ~$2k.

> am I missing something?

I'd want more background behind what you mean by "at least for business". What kind of business? Obviously IaaS providers like Digital Ocean and Linode are are type of business that would not use other clouds. Dropbox and Backblaze as well would probably never use something like S3. And there are legitimate use cases outside of tech that have needs in specific teams for low latency compute, or its otherwise cost and time prohibitive to shuttle terabytes of data to the cloud and back (3D rendering, TV news rooms, etc). If you're talking about general business systems that can be represented by a website or app with a CRUD API, then most of that probably doesn't require on-prem. But that's not the only reason businesses buy servers.