> One of the great things about cloud instances is that I can scale them up or down with the load without being locked into some hardware I purchased. For products I’ve worked on that have activity curves that follow day-night cycles or spike on holidays, this has been amazing. In some cases we could auto scale down at night and then auto scale back up during the day.

At work we have this day / night cycle. But for some reason we're married to AWS. If we provisioned 24/7/365 a bunch of servers at Hetzner or such to cover the peaks with some margin, it would still be cheaper by a notable margin. Sure, 90% of them would twiddle their thumbs from 22 PM to 10 AM. So what?

Sure, if your clients are completely unpredictable and you'll see x100 traffic without notice, the cloud is great.

But how many companies are actually in that kind of situation? Looking back over a year or two, we're quite reliably able to predict when we'll have more visitors and how many more compared to baseline. We could just adjust the headroom to be able to take in those spikes. And I suppose if you want to save the environment, you could just turn off the Hetzner servers while they sit unused.

If you can reasonably estimate your usage and the peak total usage is less than ~5x the minimum, it still makes sense to just rent hardware at Hetzner.

You even have the possibility of managed racks, whereby you rent one or more racks, but the servers are still provided by Hetzner so you don't have to handle procurement, logistics or replacements.