But one big benefit of cloud providers is that you can spin up those servers for testing and when it doesn't work out as expected, you can just magically make them go away. If you're putting out the capital to buy servers in a rack, you have to use them all the time for the cost benefit to work out. A regular test environment that is used all the time? Yes, that could possibly be cheaper if you purchase the hardware but you also need to amortize the cost of purchasing new servers every 3 to 5 years to get the equivalent of the equipment provided by the cloud provider.