Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

All of which tends to be more expensive if you replace the "colo center" at the end with "cloud provider".

Operating a cloud setup is by no means free of operational issues.

> so you'd need staff in more than 1 region

If you're too small to need that, you use managed hosting, pay a tiny premium over bare metal colo providers, but still far less than a cloud setup.

> It's not simplistic at all

Yes, it is, it is trivial to model, and for companies that don't have the experience, there are consultancies everywhere that will do it for you (that's part of what I do for a living - it's always the easiest jobs to get paid for, because there are hard numbers that shows them how much more they'll be saving that year than what they'll be paying me).

> but unless your hosting costs are really dragging down profit, I'd pinch pennies elsewhere personally.

I regularly deal with clients where hosting costs are measured in tens of percent of total operating costs. For a lot of internet related business, hosting is a massive drag.

That's part of what I do for a living, yet my clients tends to have recovered my fees in 2-3 months from the savings they make on reduced hosting costs. Those savings include factoring in the ongoing operational costs.

50%+ savings is not unusual. We've achieved 90% in rare cases (high bandwidth requirements - bandwidth costs are extreme at the cloud providers).

> But the cost becomes 'non starter' when you start to access all the nice things that cloud offers: Lambdas, S3, easy backups, etc. etc. and the fact that it 'scales on demand'.

Nothing in a bare metal setup precludes you from using cloud functionality when/where it makes economic sense to do that rather than implement an alternative. I have plenty of hybrid setups running.

> Then of course there are the financing aspects: you don't pay for expensive servers up front, you 'lease' them effectively - which has serious working capital benefits.

That's what we do when we use colocated servers too. There is no difference there.

> So sure - if you want to compare only 'server instance costs' - maybe 'buying your own instance' - specifically on a server by server basis ... maybe it's cheaper to buy a server.

I'm not comparing only server instance costs. I'm comparing total cost of operating fully managed environments, including total staff costs including staff overheads.

> I'd argue that 'rolling your own infrastructure'

You don't need to roll your own infrastructure - you can go to managed hosting providers, or the multitude of consultancies like mine that will do it for you. Heck, I'll happily sign deals with people where I'm paid in a given percent of the saving I generate, because the savings are large and predictable.

> And even then I'm not so sure - this is why so many big and successful companies still use the cloud.

Big, successful companies don't pay the published rates. I have direct knowledge of companies with 75%+ discounts from major cloud providers. At those rates: yes, it is cost effective.