Just because you are using AWS/GCP/Azure doesn't mean that you don't need sysadmins. They are called DevOps engineers then.

I scaled my SaaS pretty far with no sysadmin nor Devops, nor any plans to acquire either. I know enough to setup some cloud servers, but I’m not qualified to manage barebones Linux at scale. The hacker news go rent a Hertzer trope is rather tired. If it was better, why aren’t more people picking it?

The type of people that colocate or generally avoid the cloud for cost reasons in my experience don't overlap a lot with the "I write blog posts about everything I do" crowd.

Because often someone else is paying for it (organization/investor/government) or the money cannot be used for something else. Another common reason is as a way to circumvent internal politics.

In my experience, whenever someone actually had to "foot the bill" for the AWS premium, your argument that the cloud is cheaper overall came under a very heavy scrutiny, including justifying those extra "9s" that increase administration effort.

The budget lists system administration cost at $12,875.29. Presumably that's not a full-time sysadmin. And there's no line-item for a devops engineer.

So administration costs aren't zero today, but I suspect they'd be higher if they moved off the cloud.

25% for site administration and moderation.