I mean, I don’t believe my resume should be required to backup my point, but I literally maintained AC units and refueled diesel generators in datacenter as a kid. Obviously there’s more to it than A/C: and yes Equinix does a lot, but it’s the same trade off: slightly more complex software to eliminate non-company-specific specialities. Yes it’s worth it, my evidence is that infrastructure engineers I’ve met aren’t stupid.

I don't understand what in your mind makes overpriced cloud good while non-overpriced cloud (or "hosting" as we used to call it) bad?

Both manage air conditioning, power, fire suppression, etc and ultimately live and die by their uptime, so they have an incentive to do it right.

That wasn't the comparison. It was cloud or no cloud. Running your own hosting infrastructure from the ground up is a considerable complexity. AWS is not valuable because people are too stupid or lazy to run their own systems.

There's a lot of nuance in cloud or no cloud. You jumped right to AC and diesel.

You can have a pretty sizable server capability on modern hardware before you need to touch that.

I can serve what... 1M users? perhaps 10M users? before my server equipment needs it's own AC unit. Depending on the system needs, architecture, complexity, and perhaps language. I can get 100Mb-1Gb of egress bandwidth pretty easily at most residences, let alone business locations.

I can buy battery backup capacity for cheaper than ever, can probably skip the generator. If you go multi region maybe even skip the deep backup power, for just enough to get clean shutdown, and just fall back early.

It's never been easier to do hosting than it is now. If you get your head out of the clouds anyway.

All of this. None of the physical or network stuff requires aws. Not even close.