You don't know what you don't know.
EDIT: As suggested below by toomuchtodo, at this level of deployment - Colo would be cheaper.
Its not cost effective compared to hiring ops and colo'ing it yourself. Once you're large enough, you hit tipping points:
* When to move from cloud to dedicated equipment
* When to move from dedicated equipment to someone else's colo (usually Equinix, but lots of providers in this space with varying levels of "warm fuzzies", which would cover on site techs, power and network redundancy, diesel commitments, and so on)
* When to move from someone else's colo to your own datacenter
(or in the other direction, depending on business requirements)
It also helps that US tax code (Sec 179) provides gracious depreciation schedules for physical compute/network/etc, which means that profit spread between cloud providers and you running your own gear goes back into your business or into your pocket
Disclaimer: 15 years of ops experience, including selling hosting to Fortune 500 companies as well as helping companies move from cloud to on-prem as well as the other way around. I've had to run cost/benefit analysis for this most of my career.
There's a sweet spot between 1 server and some number, say into the hundreds, where OVH is still cost effective. Beyond that you'll absolutely want to roll with your own gear because you can negotiate for a whole cage instead of partial racks.
We know from experience that public cloud is a huge money sinkhole compared to running your own cloud on bare metal (we use proxmox).
I'm sure you know operating costs better than we do though, we don't have our own Datacenter.
200 servers (at least the one we were interested in) would cost us around $22k on OVH each month. That means if I remove the personal that I would have to hire, the cost of servers is now down to $6k/month (200/12). For that money you can't really find a better option.
In our case, where we are running thousands of severs on any given time, the flexibility is much more important than price. So we built our service around pre-emptible instances on GCE (the same as spot on AWS). You can't beat dedicated server in performance, but it's close enough and they're making for it by having a great infrastructure.
https://www.ovh.com/fr/support/service-client/support-vip.xm...
Edit: English here under support button https://www.ovh.ie/support/contact-us/
