As someone who ran a startup with 100’s of hosts. As soon as I start to count the salaries, hiring, desk space, etc of the people needed to manage the hosts AWS would look cheap again. Yea, hardware costs they are aggressively expensive. But TCO wise, they’re cheap for any decent sized company.

Add in compliance, auditing, etc. all things that you can set up out of the box (PCI, HIPPA, lawsuit retention). Gets even cheaper.