> One of the great things about cloud instances is that I can scale them up or down with the load without being locked into some hardware I purchased. For products I’ve worked on that have activity curves that follow day-night cycles or spike on holidays, this has been amazing. In some cases we could auto scale down at night and then auto scale back up during the day.

At work we have this day / night cycle. But for some reason we're married to AWS. If we provisioned 24/7/365 a bunch of servers at Hetzner or such to cover the peaks with some margin, it would still be cheaper by a notable margin. Sure, 90% of them would twiddle their thumbs from 22 PM to 10 AM. So what?

Sure, if your clients are completely unpredictable and you'll see x100 traffic without notice, the cloud is great.

But how many companies are actually in that kind of situation? Looking back over a year or two, we're quite reliably able to predict when we'll have more visitors and how many more compared to baseline. We could just adjust the headroom to be able to take in those spikes. And I suppose if you want to save the environment, you could just turn off the Hetzner servers while they sit unused.

I’ve ran MP game servers that follow this pattern. A good rule of thumb is you should cover 75% of your peak load with your cheaper steady state pre allocated machines, and burst for the last 25%. It really is that expensive to do.