Haha! Back in ~2014 or so my company was spending nearly $30,000/month on an EC2 "compute-optimized" cluster to transcode live video streams to multiple renditions. One of our engineers said hey, why don't we try to colo some real hardware? We did a test with a single bare-metal 8-core Xeon server and it completely destroyed the performance of the EC2 "compute-optimized" cluster!
After that we colo'd 4 big Xeon servers for about $1,600/month total. Looking back on it now it's just so insane...$30,000? no way.
After that we colo'd 4 big Xeon servers for about $1,600/month total. Looking back on it now it's just so insane...$30,000? no way.