Hi, startup here, with a colo and an AWS bill. The amount of time spent per a month on tasks that "AWS Handles" is almost 0 month to month. Maybe 4 trips a year into the DC. Calculating our AWS bill for fully replacing the colo is well over 4x using small 4-8gb instances. Our virtualization hosts(plural) have 64gb ram+ and 24 cores. That allows me not to focus on any scale issue since I can just shove everything into ram for no extra cost. I can buy more DDR3 ram for the servers for less than my hourly bill rate at this point.

I don't know what your company is but knowing it's sensibly renting rack space rather than jumping on the cloud bandwagon because it's the path of least resistance would give me confidence if I were a potential customer.

Perhaps that's true for a startup still trying to prove their concept, but it might not for one that has achieved product/market fit. "Hybrid cloud" is starting to get traction for large enterprises adopting the cloud [1]. They're going from on-premise in their own data centers to colocating at internet exchange data centers, which act as on-ramps to the cloud oligopoly.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/amazon-tu...

How many FTE's worth of savings are you incurring with the enormous overhead of colocated server maintenance?

The person you have to hire to manage that would cost 10x a public cloud bill

There are options other than "put your entire infrastructure on Amazon" and "hire someone fulltime to manage your physical infrastructure".

Unless you have some truly massive amount of hardware (in which case it's _definitely_ cheaper to hire someone than pay Amazon), you can generally just set it up and forget about it save for periodic maintenance and emergencies.

So what you really need to pay for is the time of someone who can do these things for you and funnily enough, such a service exists. I believe it's common in the not-startup world: a managed services provider (MSP).

And in the end this really depends on what the business is actually doing. AWS is _really_ price inefficient but in particular for bandwidth. If you're doing anything bandwidth-heavy like video, images or backup, you want to keep the hell away from any kind of cloud.

It's a classic pre-mature optimization. Source: Guy who manages 'private cloud'

I don't think you quite appreciate how much (some) companies (including startups) spend on public clouds.