This is always an unfair comparison because for any realistic comparison you need to have two servers on two locations for georedundancy and need to pay for the premises and their physical security, too. For example, you need to pay for security locks with access log and a commercial security company, or you have to pay for co-location in a datacenter.

When you add up all these costs plus the electricity bill, I wager that many cloud providers are on the cheaper side due to the economy of scale. I'd be interested in such a more detailed comparison for various locations / setups vs cloud providers.

What almost never goes into this discussion, however, is the expertise and infrastructure you lose when you put your servers into the cloud. Your own servers and their infrastructure are MOAT that can be sold as various products if needed. In contrast, relying on a cloud provider is mostly an additional dependency.

A high-density cabinet in a datacenter costs $4k at most, including power and bandwidth.

That's nothing compared to an average AWS bill.

> you need to have two servers on two locations for georedundancy

You also absolutely need this with EC2 instances, which is what the comparison was about. So no, it's not unfair.

If you're using an AWS service built on top of EC2, Fargate, or anything else, you WILL see the same costs (on top of the extremely expensive Ops engineer you hire to do it, of course).

> need to pay for the premises and their physical security, too [...] plus the electricity bill

...and all of this is included in the Hetzner service.

Once again comments conflating "dedicated server" with "co-location".