Cost Comparison Between AWS and Self-Purchased Servers

After cloud computing became popular, people seem to have developed the notion that "using cloud is cheap, public cloud is cheap."

The proposition "Is public cloud cheap?" seems clear, but is actually quite vague.

For example, when you say "bread is cheap," do you mean cheaper than steamed buns or cheaper than cake?

Are you comparing bread and steamed buns by equal weight or equal volume?

Is it sliced bread, croissant, or filled bread?

Is it freshly baked bread for tasting, or clearance sale for near-expiry?

Is it sold at a bakery or a supermarket?

Let's first determine as similar configurations as possible. It should be noted that vCPU corresponds to a hyper-thread, not a core, which is sometimes confused.

Then looking at comparable prices, the Dell R730 JD.com price is 20,199 yuan, calculated with 5-year depreciation; IDC hosting costs including data center power are estimated at 9,000 yuan per year, totaling 31,039 yuan over three years. AWS Ningxia c5.4xlarge, with 900G st1 disk, has a 3-year price of 30,922 yuan. As we can see, the prices are basically equal.

If we consider the reliability, automatic OS upgrades, automatic backups, and other services provided by AWS, the advantages of AWS cloud become very obvious.