Asking: Okay, clearly there are a lot of people here with lots of experience running their software on cloud services from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. Good.

But what about a solo founder running their Web site on a "full tower" computer they plugged together themselves?

So, why use a cloud server farm with its expense and complexity?

Or, get a mother board, a processor with 16 cores and a 4+ GHz clock, 128 GB of main memory, some rotating and/or solid state disks for a total of 20 TB or so, some external disks for backup, a recent copy of Windows Server, applications software from .NET, and a 1 Gbps Internet connection?? The computer -- tower case, power supply, motherboard, processor, disk, solid state disks, and Windows Server -- costs ~$3000?

So, a 1 Gbps Internet connection, ~$100 a month, would have capacity of, say, 100 MBps. If sending a Web page with 200 KB, then the peak capacity would be

     100 MBps / 200 KB = 500 pages/second.

Then 500 pages a second with 5 ads per page with revenue of, say, $2 per thousand ads sent (CPM), that would be

     500 * 5 * 2 / 1000 = $5/second

at peak capacity or maybe an average of half that for $2.50/second.

Then at 16 hours a day that would be revenue of

     2.50 * 60 * 16 * 30 = $72,000/month

For the electric power, at 200 W and $0.10/KWh, that would be

     200 * 24 * 30 * 0.10 / 1000 = $14.40/month

How many users?

With peak capacity of 500 pages a second and average of half that, 250 pages a second, for 16 hours a day, that would be

     250 * 60 * 16 * 30 = 7,200,000

pages a month. If on average send 5 pages per user, that would be

     7,200,000 / 5 = 1,440,000

users per month.

If users come on average 2 times a week that would be 8 times a month or

     1,440,000 / 8 = 180,000 users

from one tower case and some Web page software.

So, why use a cloud server farm with its expense and complexity?