The cloud is great for scaling indeed, but a cheap Intel V4 server with 44 cores from Ebay for $2000 can handle a shit ton of traffic too.

If I were building a new business, I would use both cloud and colo. But I do understand that everyone don't have that luxury.

The technical ability to scale is a bit meaningless if you can't afford it.

Then that becomes part of your business + technology planning conversations:

"This is the cost of scaling, this is the cost of owning our own infra, how does that fit into our budgeting and requirements?"

"If you can't afford it" is doing a lot of assuming and a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. Whether or not you can afford it depends strongly on your scaling bounds (how much you need to scale) and how you've chosen to implement it.

There are plenty of tools and systems that can present a sufficiently linear cost relationship to load and usage that, should your COGS versus revenue make sense, the marginal cost of increased cloud resources a no-brainer--especially versus always-paid-for hardware. If you don't have such a linear relationship you're as much in the position of deciding whether the project is viable as you are anything else.

If you have a large environment to build in a certain region, the cloud lead time is months also. We have to give our cloud provider months notice before building in a region. But we have a pretty serious and profitable workload. Your statement is correct for the 90% of companies with relatively small infrastructure needs.

> The lead time for new servers deployed in a data center is weeks compared to seconds in the cloud.

The lead time for Hetzner or OVH is measured in minutes and is appropriate for the majority of use cases. Old-school providers like these used to run the entire internet before the cloud craze started.

Colocation & own datacenter is not a good choice for most startups. Seems like a lot of people here miss a step and only go from one extreme to the other. There's a middle-ground of renting bare-metal that gives you amazing price/performance with none of the drawbacks of colocation or running your own DC.

> If you don't know what you're doing, you can nuke your budget super quick.

And even if you do, which I think you’ll agree Troy Hunt does.