Re: 30GB of RAM, 320GB of SSD, and 16vCPUs for $1.20 ..
Spoken like someone scared to lose their job to the cloud! (he said, sarcastically)
Just to pick that apart a bit...(beware, sketchy maths)
You're assuming 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. So you don't want to go for the hourly option, you want "Reserved Instances". Let's assume you're going for the highest level of reserved instance "Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances". You're now looking at $3726 for the year, or about 40% of the quoted cost.
If you're committed to buying hardware, you're probably not looking to chuck it away after a year either, right? So you could sign up for a 3 year contract? You're now looking at $5804 for the entire 3 year period - $2000 a year.
I don't know what the power consumption would be on a server? I dunno, maybe 500w total power consumption? So 3 years * 365 days * 24 hours * 0.5 units an hour (unit being 1 kw/h), google says 43,800 units? British Gas electricity is about 0.15gbp a unit, say a business rate is one third of that (talking out my ass here, I have no idea what business electricity costs), that's 5p a unit, so google says about 2000gbp / 3000usd?
So now you're down to having $3000 to spend on the server. Not looking so good now, is it? Then take into account the cost of employing someone to maintain it - for arguments sake, we'll assume that you have 1 person doing hardware and 1 doing networking; you keep the networking guy on because as you said somewhere else, you do still need someone on board to do the network config. So you've just lost the hardware guy - maybe $60 000 a year saved there?
I'm not saying you're completely wrong: in a number of situations, you will be better off buying hardware. But to use the blanket statement '...piss myself with laughter when cloud-tards call this "economical"...' - maybe *some* of the "cloudtards" have actually done their research, and are going down this route because it actually IS economical?
Or has AWS become as big as it has because NO-ONE uses their products?