Comment by PunchyHamster

> The main cost with on-prem is not the price of the gear but the price of acquiring talent to manage the gear. Most companies simply don't have the skillset internally to properly manage these servers, or even the internal talent to know whether they are hiring a good infrastructure engineer or not during the interview process.

That's partially true; managing cloud also takes skill, most people forget that with end result being "well we saved on hiring sysadmins, but had to have more devops guys". Hell I manage mostly physical infrastructure (few racks, few hundred VMs) and good 80% of my work is completely unrelated to that, it's just the devops gluing stuff together and helping developers to set their stuff up, which isn't all that different than it would be in cloud.

> And remember, you want 24/7 monitoring, replication for disaster recovery, etc.

And remember, you need that for cloud too. Plenty of cloud disaster stories to see where they copy pasted some tutorial thinking that's enough then surprise.

There is also partial way of just getting some dedicated servers from say OVH and run infra on that, you cut out a bit of the hardware management from skillset and you don't have the CAPEX to deal with.

But yes, if it is less than at least a rack, it's probably not worth looking for onprem unless you have really specific use case that is much cheaper there (I mean less than usual half)