> Now add to the $200 month bare metal server, the yearly salary of the 3 admins you need to manage it.

That's the line the clouds, MSPs, and service contract providers sell you on, but it's never true. When you need help you're getting some minimum wage slave who hired on 6 months ago, and is struggling to juggle the dozens of other clients competing with you for his time, too. When you don't need help, they get to take your money for doing nothing.

Anything your provider can do for you, you can do at less cost. Cut out the middle man and you're far better off.

> Cut out the middle man and you're far better off.

All that knowledge is now in-house, and you have access to it at a moment’s notice.

Around here, you'd spread the work of one new server to folks you've already got or spread the cost of new hires to a large number of servers.

I think it's also worth considering that many outfits wouldn't get good value from the 24/365 coverage you propose and don't care to pay for it.

Or you'd hire an MSP. Having a full time employee is a greater level of service than anyone here is getting from a cloud provider. Lots of folks can get by with an admin who stops in once or twice a week, or remotes in and takes care of the daily tasks on largely a part-time basis.

I think this is valid in many cases. A decent sysadmin in the US is (speculating) 200K USD, a good one in Europe is 120K+ euro. You have cheaper but they probably can't explaint a UDP datagram or know how ECMP over BGP works. It's the understanding of all of the underling tech which make them worth there weight in gold.

No Sysadmin in Europe is being paid 120k Euro. It‘s learned trade and you‘d be lucky to pull 70k.

The calculation from the management side of 120K Euro is correct. And you are also correct that they are lucky in Europe to get paid 70K.

To pay them around 70K, you need to budget for 120K. It will go into social security, taxes, training, overheard of management, HR team, other costs centers like a margin to account for sickness, absenteeism, people who are trying to "find themselves", personal crisis etc...

The sysadmin you need to manage your cloud infrastructure isn't going to be any cheaper, and if you want high-reliability 24/7, you still need your own staff on call 24/7, so you still need multiple sysadmins.

If some cloud setup can halve your sysadmin labor, then a company with 20 sysadmins can go to 10 sysadmins, but a company with 1, 2 or 3 sysadmins still needs all of them.

I can't tell you how ECMP over BGP works and I was an SRE at Google. Your idea of what's needed to run Linux servers is well over the top.

Cloud services don't need management or specialized workers?

Everything but the most mission critical applications can get away without any of that. I get your point though.

why you'd need 3 admins watching it 24/7?

____________

That's how I've seen it working in datacenter:

cheapest junior admins (450$/month) were having night shifts

and if something broke, then they were calling an engineer

The cloud is no magic place. You need the same people for your cloud infrastructure. Sure you don‘t have a bare metal server failing but you can replace that with a lot of AWS infrastructure glue which could fail too.

> a $200/month bare metal server

For 1 bare metal server? You do know these things run on electricity, right?

For €400/mo all in, split between my friend and I, I've got an air-conditioned office at the local business park with the back room stuffed with ~10 servers, redundant internet links with BGP announcements of our /24 so failover is transparent, and all of that is 10 minutes walk from home. Granted, the setup is more than a bit YOLO; the servers are in two piles rather than a proper rack and the fiber to the servers is just flapping in the breeze from the AC, but we've been able to fix literally everything that went wrong except for a power outage ~a year ago when somebody got a bit overzealous with a backhoe within 30 minutes.

The main difference between what we've got and a proper setup is on the order of about €5k of fixed costs, all of which have a lifespan of ~decades. The savings from owning your own hardware might shock you.

Also, if you think that the "professional" hosts do any better, consider that that Hetzner box you linked is a desktop machine shoved onto a rack shelf.

> Also, if you think that the "professional" hosts do any better, consider that that Hetzner box you linked is a desktop machine shoved onto a rack shelf.

This.

People think "professional" and act like it hides the fact that it's all the same people running stuff on a shoestring budget.

That $50/mo boxes in Hetzner tend to stay up for years it a testament to that there isn't any black magic or huge costs to keep them running.