I was PM for a cloud hosting solution that we were originally running colocated. We moved it all to AWS for about 5x the costs after you calculated capex vs opex etc.
"The Cloud" allowed our customers to set up their applications with High Availability and PITR (via RDS, building that ourselves at scale would have been problematic). It also allowed us to launch services anywhere in the world. Setting up data centers globally would have been hell.
The product was still easily profitable despite the costs, so I think we made the right move.
We are nearly two decades from the launch of EC2 and I still need to explain to people (technical and not) that the cloud isn’t cheaper once you get to a certain scale. Everyone is always amazed.
"The Cloud" allowed our customers to set up their applications with High Availability and PITR (via RDS, building that ourselves at scale would have been problematic). It also allowed us to launch services anywhere in the world. Setting up data centers globally would have been hell.
The product was still easily profitable despite the costs, so I think we made the right move.