Ordering that amount of amount of servers takes about one hour with hetzner. If you truly want a complete rack on your own maybe a few days as they have to do it manually.

Most companies don‘t need to scale up full racks in seconds. Heck, even weeks would be ok for most of them to get new hardware delivered. The cloud planted the lie into everyone‘s head that most companies dont have predictable and stable load.

What would be the cost/time of scaling down a rack on Hetzner?

rental period is a month you can also use hetzner cloud, which is still roughly 10x less expensive then aws and that does not take into account the vastly cheaper traffic

Most businesses could probably know server needs 6-12 months out. There's a small number of businesses in the world that actually need dynamic scaling.

>I mean, how come even large consumers of electricity do not buy and own their own infrastructure to generate it?

They sure do? BASF has 3 power plants in Hamburg, Disney operate Reedy Creek Energy with at least 1 power plant and I could list a fair bit more...

>For example, how long does it take to rent another rack that you didnt plan for?

I mean, you can also rent hardware a lot cheaper then on AWS. There certainly are providers where you can rent out a rack for a month within minutes

Some universities also have their own power plants. It’s also becoming more common to at least supplement power on campus with solar arrays.

One other appealing alternative for smaller startups is to run Docker on one burstable vm. This is a simple setup and allows you to go beyond the cpu limits and also scale up the vm.

Might be other alternatives than using Docker so if anyone has tips for something simpler or easier to maintain, appreciate a comment.