[sofixa]

Why? Especially for small and medium businesses, the capital costs involved rarely make sense, and if you're leasing, might as well lease from a cloud provider which saves you time and people. There are many smaller players which are OK depending on uptime requirements - OVHCloud, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Scaleway, Linode, etc.

[ericd]

The capital costs are very easy to make back. For us, the payback period was <1 year, and our machines provided unbeatable performance with very good transparency into issues, which made it relatively easy to track down issues. Dedicated machines are really, really powerful now, and you can do with a few what it used to take racks. I feel like the perception of “it’s too hard” or “it’s actually more expensive” is subtly encouraged and reinforced by the myriad companies that stand to benefit - all those hosted services, the cloud providers, etc. And they make it easy for individual employees to appear more productive, but in exchange for costing their companies much more in the long run, and introducing a lot of inter-service latency and complexity. Misaligned incentives.

The major exception for us is S3, scaling storage seems like it would suck terribly.

[FpUser]

>...is subtly encouraged and reinforced by the myriad companies that stand to benefit..."

Not just companies. Web developers love the complexity of their stack. Some monolith written in native performant language and put on a decent hardware can cover needs of the most reasonable size business. This simple fact makes them very uncomfy when presented. Many of them would not be even aware that such things are possible. They'd rather be spoon fed by the likes of the Amazon telling them how to develop their wares. The fact that the more inefficient their software is the more money said Amazon will make is ignored. They'd invent all kinds of largely BS arguments to avoid going a simpler route. One can just read numerous articles on HN describing "our stack". On a client site they have this React atrocity. Sure this thing works well for orgs the size of FB. But they're not FB and never will be.

[kazen44]

this happens lower down the stack too.

Distributed redundancy is a good example. There are very, very few situation in which this couldn't be resolved with a simple BGP daemon on a server and anycast.

[pdimitar]

I don't disagree with you but I wonder if you are underestimating how many years of useful service can you get out of dual Xeon E-2690v3 systems. Almost no business actually needs the latest and greatest -- the only serious concern when hosting on-prem is energy consumption and heat dissipation. If that can be covered well the rest is much easier to cope with.

[FpUser]

I do have some server hardware on premises (well it is in my basement and I have fat internet pipes) but I do not mind going middle road and renting dedicated servers on Hetzner and OVH. They're surprisingly cheap for whet they offer. The same performance / resource wise hardware on Amazon would make one bleed the money.

[pdimitar]

Agreed, and that's just what we might end up doing btw. A bit more manual sysadmin work which we end up doing on EC2 instances currently anyway. And a lot of money can be saved by EU dedicated server hosting.