>>106967966
Cloud used to be cheaper, and owning servers used to be very expensive.
My first job is the perfect example. I was the only sysadmin of a medium-sized insurance company. We had 2 internet links (dedicated 5Mb links) and it was crazy expensive.
We had 2 proper servers, but they were so dawm energy inefficient that we needed to upgrade the HVAC to 20 BTU just for the "server room".
One day the RAID board (which has a dedicated lithium battery to make sure nothing gets corrupted in case of a power down) caught fire and destroyed both servers. We had backups, but to get the hardware from DELL was something like 1 week and a half. So in desperation we decided to try the cloud. I brought a bunch of VMs (our servers used to run VMWare) and I spent an entire night there, with my personal laptop, uploading the dump to have it running the next morning.
Just the price alone from the dedicated internet links paid for the cloud (cloud used to be just VMs, though; I know that this nowadays is just a fraction of the cost) that we replace for a much cheaper and "faster" 20Mb link.

Nowadays you are better off with cheap and energy-efficient desktop hardware. You don't need expensive SAS discs when you can just get a bunch of SSDs and use RAID. The internet is cheaper and more reliable; you can get fibre EVERYWHERE.