it's about your usage needs.

renting and owning have different costs, more than purely economic. if you own your own hardware... you have to maintain it. if you rent it, you don't.

if an AWS server blade on which I'm hosting blows up, I don't have to go spend $5000 to replace it. if I am running off that server blade from my home.. it can blow up with the bonus risk of possibly burn my house down. also if someone hacks my serve in my basement and stuff CP on it... well that's another big risk that I wouldn't have if I was renting, because if someone hacks my amazon AWS rental space, the cops aren't going to come raid my home. they subpoena amazon.

home owning is no different. it involves much more risk than renting. and being a landlord assumes yet more risk as you take on the risk of your tenants.

but most people dont' understand any of this. they don't even have a basic economics 101 understanding. there is also this thing called insurance, usage agreements, etc, that all have pricing affects and can be used to mitigate risks at increased costs.

I run IT for my company in a hybrid structure. Certain legal requirements and risk factors require us to keep certain services/data on premises, and other services we have moved to the cloud (rental) because it's cheaper and takes less man-hours of maintenance and assumes less risk. 10 years ago were entirely on premises and used zero cloud services, but we also had more downtime and had to shut down operations if we had a power loss or connectivity. Now power loss has a minimal impact and connectivity losses are mere annoyances.