Not to mention the superior network connectivity (10 gigabit/s). In fact, there are no 10gbps options from the common last mile carriers available at any price (AT&T, Crapcast). And if they did offer it, it'd probably be $500USD/mo+ just for Internet.
AT&T has a 5gbps fiber plan available for $250USD+/mo, but there are very few (>10 fractional portions of cities nationally) areas where it is offered today.
If you have a strong enough desire for cost-effective, really fucking fast Internet for a fair price, move to Korea. In .kr you can get 10gig for something like $30-50USD/mo.
> $60/yr vs thousands of $ upfront for a comparable desktop or notebook machine.
I don't think we're talking about the same things here.
I could upgrade to dual 2.5 GigE but I have nothing that needs that much bandwidth. I can download 30gb from hugging face in a few minutes which doesn't bother me.
The DC is about to onboard another client of mine, a startup that ran on AWS credits for 9 months. They are upgrading to a 64 core 2TB ram box that was an extra the DC had, for $3500, which will probably go into the rack next to mine.