Why is it surprising? Building and maintaining custom data centers is a big, slow business initiative. It takes months to years of forecasting to get the data center buildout to match the business needs, as opposed to the extreme flexibility of using a cloud provider.
> There's also something to be said for buying a VPS or a Colo machine, making sure it's backed up and dealing with the 9's that you get from that machine on it's own. I am routinely surprised by how far a single node machine will get you.
For personal projects this is exactly what I do. It’s great until something goes wrong with that one machine or VPS.
But it’s not really a good option for any business that needs consistent operations and uptime. Years ago I worked at a company that tried to self-host some of their collaboration tools on a VPS to save money over the cloud-hosted versions. When the server went down it stalled productivity for a day while the team restored a backup, with another week of confusion as we tried to find all of the things that were lost between the last backup and when the server went down.
When someone did the rough estimations on how much it cost to pay everyone’s salaries for that day of lost productivity, the number was far higher than the trivial cost savings we got from self-hosting. We also had a constant background burden on someone internally to maintain and monitor the server, plus the burden of them being on call. Often, moving to cloud anything can be a huge load off the company’s back.
