[joshuaellinger]

I would find an existing business that is hosting on the public cloud. Often, it is just a bunch of VMs that don't really leverage what the cloud has to offer -- they are just convenient.

Offer to migrate them from the cloud to a private hosting for what they are paying today but place them on hardware that has x2-10 the existing capacity. You provide all the IT work that they are paying Amazon to avoid.

I basically did that for myself. I was paying $10K/mo to Azure. To get the RAM I really needed would have pushed my costs to $20K/mo so I bought $30K (4 machines) in hardware and signed up for coloc @ $1K/mo but it cost me two months in my time to move everything. The time hurt more than the cash.

If you can do that for one company that is spending $100K/mo at Azure/AWS/Google, then your runway gets a lot longer.