[southerntofu]

> People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers

Sysadmins are not rare they're just not the people you hear about in Silicon Valley bubble anymore. 90+% of businesses haven't moved to the "cloud" (i.e. whoever the fuck's computer you can't get your hands on in case of problems) and even if they wanted to it would make no sense: most businesses just need a basic website and an email/accounting service. Cloud abstractions provide much complexity and zero benefits for such usecases.

> But in my experience people argue one option a lot without being to deliver the other.

I'm in this box. I can't deliver "cloud" computing and from a political perspective i refuse to "learn". Also, it makes no sense for the non-profit projects i work with: the biggest ones need at most a few servers which is still manageable by hand and certainly easier to deal with via Ansible/Chef than via new layers of abstractions and all their new failure modes (eg k8s/AWS).

[realityking]

> most businesses just need a basic website and an email/accounting

I think those businesses should definitely go to the Cloud - but not IaaS. Use Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace for the email needs and a Website-as-a-service vendor, whether that’s wordpress.com or Webflow.

[southerntofu]

I'm not saying you're wrong, but why do you call that the cloud again? Mutualized hosting is what we've been doing since "forever".

The part where i disagree: don't go with Microsoft or Google, they're the worst. They've got less-than-stellar service, abysmal support, and they're capitalist assholes. Go with a local tech coop or non-profit (or even just a local tech artisan for-profit company) with friendly support.

I think it's been said in many other threads, but it's always worth repeating: by using Microsoft/Google email services, you make it impossible for others to use a solution of their choice because they will be blocked despite having perfect server configuration.