Outpriced of on-prem

For the last 12 years, all I’ve heard whenever I’ve read posts from other practitioners of our most noble of professions, I have seen a common prediction: Roughly every 10 years, organisations swing back and forth between Cloud and On-prem.

As someone who has been heavily invested in the cloud-side of the fence since the beginning of my career (several Azure certs, and a whole lot of AWS solo-sysadmin experience), this particular prediction had me losing a bit of sleep. All these greybeards must know something I don’t, right? Do I need to brush up on my VMWare or Hyper-V skills? Should I finally learn the difference between RAID-0 and 1?

Well, as of August 2026 i’m feeling pretty secure that no organisation will be approving physical server purchases.

Exhibit A - https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1vacqzw/pricing_shock/

Exhibit B - https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1vywlej/server_prices_are_insane_now_128k_for_a_decwnt_vm/

Unfortunately for me, my budget for self-hosting also won’t be getting approved either. I’ll be deep in the cold ground before I spend $300 AUD on 4 measly terabytes. Hold onto whatever hardware you’ve got, hopefully it’ll weather the storm.

I miss the GPU pricing bubble caused by cryptocurrency miners, at least that only affected one of my hobbies…