They could also just rent dedicated bare metal servers on a month-to-month basis, getting whatever hardware specs they want so long as it's not overly exotic. Then they don't have to worry about anything at the data centre or hardware level.
Given that cloud costs easily 6-7x for the equivalent amount of hardware resources as a well priced dedicated server provider, you can just buy 2-3x the resources you need for extra scalability and not have to share those resources with anyone. Or if you are in the tiny minority of companies that really does have extremely erratic load requirements, you can put your base load on bare metal and your excess load on cloud.
I don't understand why people on HN always put forth a false dichotomy between cloud and running your own data centre when there's a plethora of different mixes of infrastructure and managed services that falls in between.
Given that cloud costs easily 6-7x for the equivalent amount of hardware resources as a well priced dedicated server provider, you can just buy 2-3x the resources you need for extra scalability and not have to share those resources with anyone. Or if you are in the tiny minority of companies that really does have extremely erratic load requirements, you can put your base load on bare metal and your excess load on cloud.
I don't understand why people on HN always put forth a false dichotomy between cloud and running your own data centre when there's a plethora of different mixes of infrastructure and managed services that falls in between.