At work, we use a dedicated server provider, so we're; when we identify faulty hardware, we file a ticket, and they swap it out. We still need to have enough bare metal machines allocated so we can turn one off while they fix it, etc; but we don't worry about staffing or supplying the datacenter.

I wouldn't want to switch to AWS from this; bare metal plus a good account manager gives us a lot of visibility and reliability; Netflix blogs a lot about the chaos that is AWS, and we save a lot of effort by having machines that for the msot part just work, consistently; instead of having to deal with instances where performance is variable, etc. Running our own datacenter might be nice for some reasons: more control and information about the network, ability to make hardware choices that don't match the providers offerings, etc; but running a datacenter is a big change.

Sorry, I don't get it - why would you consider using cloud servers if you don't have significant spikes in your traffic?

Regarding hardware failures - it's not that hard to arrange proper redundancies in your systems, and it will certainly be cheaper than outsourcing it to Amazon. Cloud only becomes cost effective when your spikes are several times larger than your normal traffic, and you must maintain good QoS at all times.

I worked at a company where the whole server room was flooded. They had to replace everything and restore stuff from backups.

Two weeks later, they had to do it all over again because something went wrong with the air conditioning and the servers got cooked.

I kept recommending going with AWS because of that... I no longer work there, but as far as I know they're still running their own servers.

Why AWS and not just co-locating the servers somewhere?

I wasn't dead set on AWS, I was just using it as an example. Any sufficiently large company would have worked.

>it's not that hard to arrange proper redundancies in your systems

If it really were like 'apt-get install redundancy' I'm pretty sure that AWS would have 1/10th the clients it has now.

Because sometimes cloud servers are very cost effective, easy, and fast to deploy: Digital Ocean for example.

$40 / month for 4gb of ram, 4tb of transfer, and two cores, is very cost effective. Linode is also very reasonable.

If all I need is that scale of computing, what should I use instead that makes sense other than cloud services? Setting up colo or a dedicated box for that would be more expensive and a much larger hassle.

Arguably, Digital Ocean is more like a regular hosting provider with better onboarding. Plenty of hosters offer comparable infrastructure for the same price (you can even get something dedicated).

They're also far cheaper than AWS, where you pay a premium for the elasticity and access to the ecosystem. If there's anything to compare AWS with, it would be Google Cloud Platform, Azure and maybe Rackspace.

Digital Ocean is comparable to EC2. But AWS does LOTS more.

Well, I admit, those prices are pretty good. I looked at AWS pricing 3 years ago at a SaaS company with steadily growing traffic, and at the time it didn't make sense. It might now.