Ummm. I’ve def been unable to do anything for entire days because our AWS region went down and we had to rebuild the database from scratch. AWS goes down, you twiddle your thumbs and the people you report to are going to be asking why, for how long, etc. and you can’t give them an answer until AWS comes back to see how fubar things are.
When your own hardware rack goes down. You know the problem, how much it costs to fix it, and when it will come back up; usually within a few hours (or minutes) of it going down.
Do things catch fire, yes. But I think you’re over-estimating how often. In my entire life, I’ve had a single SATA connector catch fire and it just melted plastic before going out.
I'm not talking about temporary outages, I'm talking about data loss.
With AWS it's extremely easy to keep an up-to-date database backup in a different region.
And it's great that you haven't personally encountered disaster, but of course once again that's cherry-picking. And it's not just a component overheating, it's the whole closet on fire, it's a broken ceiling sprinkler system going off, it's a hurricane, it's whatever.
So was I also talking about data loss. Not everything can be replicated, but backups can and were made.
For the rest, there’s insurance. Most calculations done in a research setting are dependent upon that research surviving. If there’s a fire and the whole building goes down, those calculations are probably worthless now too.
Hell, most companies probably can’t survive their own building/factory burning down.
I would say even easier on prem as you don't need to wade 15 layers deep to do anything. Since I have moved to hosting my own stuff at my house, I have learned that connecting a monitor and keyboard to a 'sever' is awesome for productivity. I know where everything is, its fast as hell, and everything is locked down. Monitoring temps, adjusting and configuring hardware is just better in every imaginable way. Need more RAM, Storage, Compute? Slap those puppies in there and send it.
For home gamers like myself, it's has become a no brainer with advances in tunneling, docker, and cheap prices on Ebay.
When your own hardware rack goes down. You know the problem, how much it costs to fix it, and when it will come back up; usually within a few hours (or minutes) of it going down.
Do things catch fire, yes. But I think you’re over-estimating how often. In my entire life, I’ve had a single SATA connector catch fire and it just melted plastic before going out.