[teerak]

> This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value from speed, flexibility, and not needing to pay a team to manage hardware. Just let [cloud services company] handle it for you until you reach that point.

This is an old myth. Today you can get dedicated servers provisioned in minutes with an API call. A competent DevOps person can manage 10s if not 100s with proper automation. When you have a certain baseline usage of compute moving to dedicated can give you massive savings. And if you're a heavy user of say, RDS, the cost difference can be even more dramatic while also gaining on performance. For ephemeral workloads, testing, etc. the cloud makes sense of course.

[fidgewidge]

I'd say testing/CI is one of the best cases for renting dedicated metal because of the huge speed increase available, everyone hates slow CI, and CI workers are easy to setup so if hw fails (it probably won't) it's not a big deal, you don't need to scale up again immediately.

[teerak]

Agreed, but I include CI in baseline usage. With testing I mean compute for feature branches, experiments.. that kind of stuff.