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It’s 100% work load dependent. Cloud makes dealing with complexity cheaper in many cases by letting you outsource admin to managed services, and is great if you need elastic scaling. Bare metal on the other hand can be many orders of magnitude cheaper for compute and especially bandwidth. Cloud bandwidth pricing is completely insane, up to 1000X more than bare metal hosting.

There is no one size fits all advice. You have to model your work load. Take scale into account too. Cloud often makes far more sense at a small scale than a very large scale since labor costs can amortize. There comes a point at which hiring admins may be cheaper than paying cloud costs.