Why do you assume you need a staffed data center to get cheaper bandwidth?

Just buy dedicated servers or VPSes, no datacenters or staff needed. The hosting provider takes care of the servers, staff and the datacenter.

If I ever got to where my bandwidth fees were even a hundred a month for personal projects, I'd switch over at least part of it to a VPS...

As a business, I wouldn't do it until the cost of the bandwidth+hosting exceeded the cost of an extra, dedicated employee to manage the VPS server(s).

> As a business, I wouldn't do it until the cost of the bandwidth+hosting exceeded the cost of an extra, dedicated employee to manage the VPS server(s).

Why do you think you don't need that extra person to manage the instances in a cloud setup?

My experience is the reverse: It tends to take more man-hours per instance to manage a large cloud setup, because there are many more spinning wheels. The overall complexity is often vastly larger. In fact, I have clients I manage physical servers for where the time taken per server is on average still far lower than for cloud instances even including the 2+ hours lost on travel per visit to one of the data centres if someone has to physically go in (rather than rely on "remote hands").

This is before factoring in typically higher utilization rates for the dedicated hardware, because it's easier to customize it to get the right balance of RAM, CPU and IO for your workload. The result is usually fewer dedicated servers than you would have cloud instances.

If I'm using RDS or Azure-SQL, I'm not managing a database server... The list goes on, but when starting, you may only have one person or two working on actual development... features are important... actual customers and actual revenue may well be more important than scaling to millions of users.

Working is better than not working perfectly.

How do you figure you need extra, dedicated employees to manage VPSes compared to cloud VMs?

The hosting company takes care of the VPS servers, just like Amazon takes care of the AWS servers.

Once you need to scale, you need that expertise... if I can use RDS, Azure SQL, or a number of other options to manage database services, or other systems without dedicated staff, that buys time to keep the lights on while actual solutions and features are created... an MVP needs to work... And "wasting" a few hundred a month on hosted services while trying to get something working is better than having to spend that time becoming experts on infrastructure, databases, or any number of other systems.

I'm not saying don't optimize, but I am saying that you shouldn't switch infrastructures unless you are saving enough to cover additional talent.