In my experience with modest specifications, you can source servers from tier 1 vendors (Dell, HPE, etc) with 5 years of support for less than a 1 year commitme

In my experience with modest specifications, you can source servers from tier 1 vendors (Dell, HPE, etc) with 5 years of support for less than a 1 year commitment for the roughly equivalent AWS or GCE instances (without prepayment). The monthly opex to house and power and cool those servers isn't _negligible_, but if you're doing back of napkin math comparing MRCs to Cloud you can just deduct the costs from their bandwidth charges that have been marked up 10,000%