[dijit]

> Cloud cannot be beaten on compute / price

Sorry, I can't let misinformation like that slide.

Cloud cost/benefit ratio is not good in many circumstances.

For hobbyists it works well because you run your job for very brief periods and renting is much cheaper than buying in those cases. Similarly, if your business usage is so low as to be effectively run once per day then cloud has major benefits.

However, if you are doing any kind of work that consumes more than 8hrs of computer time in a day, cloud is going to start being much more expensive.

The exact cost/benefit depends on the SKU and I'm mostly talking about CPU/Memory/Storage- for managed services like databases it's significantly worse, and I'm comparing to rented servers not self-hosting at home, which is significantly cheaper still.

Local hardware has downsides (availability, inflexibility), but it's faster and cheaper in almost all real workload scenarios where the compute would otherwise be completely idle/turned off >90% of the time.

[matyaskzs]

I should have phrased it better. If you rent cloud compute from a big provider you will probably end up paying more than if you ran that same compute, but then the actual cost of that same compute in the cloud is going to be lower when you add in economies of scale. They will get a cheaper deal on hardware, electricity and on almost anything you would need.

On the lower end, you can't beat a cheap hetzner vps for price, reliability and compute if you ran it 24/7.