From the caveat at the end of the original article:
> This article doesn’t take into account other aspects that would make the comparison even more complicated. These include people skills, financial controls, cash flow, capacity planning depending on the load type, etc.
You can't handwave all this away in real life though. If you're rolling your own data center, the engineering time you need to put into managing servers, upgrades, hardware replacements, 24/7 oncall rotations etc etc is considerable and will often dwarf the costs of the hardware itself, particularly at startup scale. With a cloud provider, it's (almost) all abstracted away.
> This article doesn’t take into account other aspects that would make the comparison even more complicated. These include people skills, financial controls, cash flow, capacity planning depending on the load type, etc.
You can't handwave all this away in real life though. If you're rolling your own data center, the engineering time you need to put into managing servers, upgrades, hardware replacements, 24/7 oncall rotations etc etc is considerable and will often dwarf the costs of the hardware itself, particularly at startup scale. With a cloud provider, it's (almost) all abstracted away.