Bare Metal compared to GCP or AWS will save you about 75% of your operating costs.
Bare Metal compared to Heroku or Firebase will save you around 90% of your operating costs (a large part of this being caused by bandwidth, which is massively overpriced at Google and Amazon).
With those savings you can usually serve 5 to 10 times as many customers.
That might not be worth it if you’re in SV, and pay your devs the same wages Amazon or Google do (as then you’ll just pay more than with AWS or GCP), but if you’re in places where you pay half the wages Amazon or Google do4 , you can actually save a lot with this arrangement.
Fwiw I started on DO and migrated off to get better stability and block storage / proper load balancing. Which DO has since added.
The egress costs for AWS, GCE, and Azure are usually the big cost driver.
But why would you buy a VM with this configuration? 32gb of RAM for two boxes, with two i7s that have 4 3.40ghz cores? Lots of people have the impression that cloud is more expensive than owning your own iron, and it probably is, but the difference is made a lot larger if you don't consider TCO and you make no effort to actually adapt your needs to the cloud. Cloud's economics are based around horizontal scaling and provisioning on-demand. If you're hosting in the cloud, you don't get two big machines like this, you shard your app over a bunch of cheap machines and you spin up more/bigger instances to meet peak demand. If you're buying cloud hosting but you go into it with "have everything we need to meet peak load running 24/7," of course it's going to cost you an arm and a leg.
