I think this is a very important point and one that many folks don't fully appreciate:
The total cost of ownership of a computing asset is several times greater than the cost of the actual asset.
Think of it this way: a dog can be obtained for a very nominal cost (or free) but the cost to house, feed, entertain, and provide healthcare for is non-trivial.
it's not unheard of for just the costs of deploying a new device into a large organization to be something like EIGHT TIMES what the cost is for the actual asset. That's just to get the hardware deployed and NOT the cost to keep it running.
Cutting down on TCO and streamlining the deployment of resources is a big part of the sell for cloud deployments. Particularly for computing assets that may otherwise spend a lot of their time idle.
Softlayer's network is crap compared to google and aws. That being said in my previous company we used a combination of Softlayer (for dedicated machines) and AWS for cloud. There is definitely a use case for each, but as Nrsolis mentions there is additional cost in things beyond the cost of the initial hardware itself.
At least with AWS you get placement groups, which can help a lot. With Softlayer we saw entirely too much packet loss on a regular basis, and they try to upsell you on things to "fix" it.
The total cost of ownership of a computing asset is several times greater than the cost of the actual asset.
Think of it this way: a dog can be obtained for a very nominal cost (or free) but the cost to house, feed, entertain, and provide healthcare for is non-trivial.
it's not unheard of for just the costs of deploying a new device into a large organization to be something like EIGHT TIMES what the cost is for the actual asset. That's just to get the hardware deployed and NOT the cost to keep it running.
Cutting down on TCO and streamlining the deployment of resources is a big part of the sell for cloud deployments. Particularly for computing assets that may otherwise spend a lot of their time idle.