> Another thing to consider: cloud providers are not very interested in individuals as customers
A key theme in the "cloud vs data center" story is that most public cloud providers (AWS, etc...) were really easy to sign up, requiring a CC and nothing else.
Meanwhile, hardware vendors wouldn't even talk to you as an individual / small business.
Tried to sign up for gcloud a couple of months ago using my >12 year old google account.
Long story short, while I technically managed to sign up, I never managed to get my GPU quotas increased to anything above 0, support is non-existent and contacting sales (which seems to be the 'official' way, but is only really intended for business customers?) never got a response...
Meanwhile, my small server (not Hetzner) has been running for many years without any issues, never had to send them anything after I signed up...
A key theme in the "cloud vs data center" story is that most public cloud providers (AWS, etc...) were really easy to sign up, requiring a CC and nothing else.
Meanwhile, hardware vendors wouldn't even talk to you as an individual / small business.