Our infrastructure is in house - research group in a University setting. Public cloud would be an absurd option for our needs economically, considering that we run our servers practically 24/7 albeit with convenience of scheduled down times, and that our servers tend to live longer than even 4 years in service. For example, some of our compute nodes after 5 years of service are now servicing users as "console servers" for users doing scientific work in the command line. We run bare-metal servers for performance intensive workloads and databases, and KVM based virtual machines for other services.

> Can you go touch your boxes? Who can add a new one and how long.

This is surprisingly not that long. I can order new machines and they are delivered for me to use in just 2 weeks. With a little bit of planning, I can squeeze a lot of performance out of them. For example, I can avoid noisy neighbours because I can control what is deployed where physically.

Another benefit of non-cloud is that I can customise the machines for their purpose. I recently built a FreeBSD/ZFS based server and chose a cheaper CPU and a lot of faster RAM to deal with. For DNS servers, queue servers and such I chose a CPU that has a higher single threaded performance at higher clock rates than ones with more cores and slower clock rates.

I see - sadly for my personal projects I can either pay for cloud hosting, or I can pay for filling up our spare room with noisy servers, cat5 cabling and general chaos.

I know which price is more expensive :-)