[Abe9000]

WIth 500K yearly you can do a lot!! Including renting 3 office spaces in multiple locations in the US and using them as data centers. Offices cost about $1000 - $3000 yearly, he doesn't need a premium space in a big building but for $500K yearly you can do a lot! In 2 years you would have spent 1M. That is more than enough to have a dedicated devops that travels to all the locations and setup the super beefy servers you can buy with that budget.

[pelasaco]

Ok but 500k is the whole budget for location, backup location, energy, devops people, operation people, etc.. I run part of our infra on-premise, and part of on AWS.. in the summer, we had issues with our air-conditioner (europe) and we had to turn-off partially our service, now in Winter because of the raising costs, we are discussing again what to do with the on-premise services, employees getting ill, etc but AWS, in another hand, is just a bill.