Earlier quoted context omitted.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. I’m a sysadmin, I know hardware. I think it’s a complete myth that hardware is hard: especially compared with the irreducible complexity that is AWS. But: I find myself coming back to the cloud. Why? It costs more and you have less control. Scale up is not as important as it seems and the 10x cost difference would mean scale is not a factor either. But, in my experience, not deal…
Why not then lease dedicated servers from a hosting provider? You still get ridiculous cost savings over cloud, and none of the long lead times you mention when buying your own hardware.
For example, we knew the limit of our big fatty pipe coming into our building. 99% of the time, we could handle all the traffic coming in. The other 1% of the time, we just offloaded the extra traffic to AWS. All the cost savings of on-prem, all the scale benefits of the cloud.