"the low price of € 169 a month and € 179 setup fee"
Yikes. Although it is 80-core, 128GB, I suppose.
Yikes. Although it is 80-core, 128GB, I suppose.
That means a little above EUR 4000 for 2 years, which is around the minimum that would be paid for a server with Epyc or Xeon of similar capacity (when you assemble it yourself, at Dell or HP it would be much more expensive).
The equivalence with Epyc/Xeon also depends a lot on the intended applications, for scientific computing a 32 cores/64 threads Epyc/Xeon might have a similar performance, while for a Web server or database server a 64 cores/128 threads Epyc might be needed to exceed the performance of the 80-core Altra CPU, and a server like that might cost as much as 4 years of renting.
So if you buy your own server and you use it for at least 5 years, then you would certainly spend much less than when renting.
However, renting a server like this can cost less when you are not certain over long-term perspectives and it also has the advantage that there is no large one-time payment.
Adding the electrical energy cost will tip the balance towards renting, but the energy cost varies a lot from place to place. For a server so expensive it is likely that the energy cost over its lifetime will be a relatively small fraction of the buying price.
The energy cost becomes much more important for those who buy 1000 servers at heavily discounted prices.
The price for the Internet link can vary a lot and I do not think that it is included in the rental price quoted above. I believe that it will be paid separately, depending on requirements, and it is likely that it would not differ much from what you would pay when having your own server.
However there are many who have their own server rooms, so they do not need to rent any extra space for a server.