I'm not forgetting that at all: I don't see how a dedicated server takes any more time than AWS. AWS adds extra things you have to do and manage.
Also, data transfer and bandwidth is far cheaper with dedicated and colos than AWS.
Also, data transfer and bandwidth is far cheaper with dedicated and colos than AWS.
We've had to fix: crappy datacenter networking, BMC issues left in place by the datacenter, hard drives spewing SMART errors, USB devices being plugged into our servers, bad RAM. Our datacenter company _moved_ at one point and we had a few hours of downtime as a server was driven to the new site.
Each of these isn't too bad, but when hardware issues or any kind of flakiness happens in "the cloud", it's so much easier to just bin the server and boot a new one – GCP will even live-migrate your VM as necessary to do this. That makes it so much more flexible. You can achieve this on dedicated servers, but not without a well resourced infrastructure team, which we (and many other companies of our size) do not have.
We don't believe we're going to save money moving to the cloud, we think it's going to cost more in fact, but we also believe we'll speed up quite significantly as a result of the move.
Vs. managing an Amazon account from a desk, any desk really, you don’t see the appeal?
You say: "But those are really expensive, require a ton of maintenance, and hard to sell later on"
Your agent looks at you and says: "Yes but do you really went to find land, get the permits, get it developed, deal with all those contractors and deal with the inevitable problems of a new constructions? A McMansion is obviously better."
The agent has apparently never heard of apartments, condos, semi-detached and so on (yet somehow holds a very strong opinion). This is a problem; you find a new agent.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-servers-for-fun-and-p...
Dealing with security patches isn't anything you wouldn't already be doing with AWS, and is in some cases easier on dedicated hardware.