Comment by WJW

Several points:

- The price for on-prem conveniently omits costs for power, cooling, networking, insurance and building space, it's only the purchase price.

- The price for the cloud server includes (your share of) the costs of replacing a broken power supply or hard drive, which is not included in the list price for on-prem. You will have to make sure enough of your devs know how to do that or else hire a few sysadmin types.

- As the article already mentions, the cloud has to provision for peak usage instead of average usage. If you buy an on-prem server you always have the same amount of computing power available and can't scale up quickly if you need 5x the capacity because of a big event. That kind of flexibility costs money.