If you’re just running some CRUD web service, then you could certainly find significantly cheaper hosting in a data center or similar, but also if that’s the case your hosting bill is probably a very small cost either way (relative to other business expenses).
> You virtually never need scalability so fast that you don't have time to add another server
What do you mean by “time to add another server?” Are you thinking about a minute or two to spin up some on-demand server using an API? Or are you talking about multiple business days to physically procure and install another server?
The former is fine, but I don’t know of any provider that gives me bare metal machines with beefy GPUs in a matter of minutes for low cost.
Weeks. I'm talking about multiple business weeks to spin up a new server. Sure, in a pinch I can do it in a weekend, but adding up all the stakeholders, talking it over and doing things right it takes weeks. It's a normal timespan for a significant chunk of extra power - a modern day server from Hetzner comes with over 1Tb of RAM and around 100 cores. This is also where all the reserve capacity comes from - you actually do have this kind of time to prepare.
Sure, there are scenarios where you need capacity faster and it's not your fault. Can't think of any offhand, but I imagine there are. It's perfectly fine for them to use cloud.
> You virtually never need scalability so fast that you don't have time to add another server
What do you mean by “time to add another server?” Are you thinking about a minute or two to spin up some on-demand server using an API? Or are you talking about multiple business days to physically procure and install another server?
The former is fine, but I don’t know of any provider that gives me bare metal machines with beefy GPUs in a matter of minutes for low cost.