You forgot there is a lot of IT work after buying the hardware to set it up properly. That’s time spent

That’s a one time cost plus maintenance.

Still comes out cheaper than cloud offerings.

Here's a completed ebay auction from April 20th that sold a 5120 for $699: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-Gold-5120-SR3GD-14-Core-... I know the pound hasn't been doing well lately, but surely it hasn't been that bad.

we're still talking years, not one month

Where are you getting $1.20/mo on 1 core/512MB ram/10GB ssd and half a GB bandiwdth? Amazon for example was something like $50/mo for bandwidth alone

You are renting an overprovisioned timeslice, not a dedicated core. Even Hetzner's time slice instances are twice the price. Their dedicated CPU instances are almost 10x the price.

possibly, but nothing to suggest that 6 months in. they suit the use cases perfectly

It's definitely a timeslice, and that throws off your comparison wildly. Otherwise you'd be able to rent a 32 core dedicated machine at the same place for $48 a month. Can you?

it mentions "dedicated resources", but it's unclear whether this applies to CPU

it might throw the comparison off if there was variation in performance at different times, but there isn't

cores scale with RAM, you cannot rent 32 with 512MB

They're probably talking about dedicated RAM, although even then I wouldn't trust it not to be overprovisioned up to 2:1 on NVME swap.

Hetzner dedicated cores come with 4gb of memory per vCPU for reference.

1.2 GBP/mo for a dedicated core is wildly off market price. There's no way they'd be able to make a profit, so either they're going out of business tomorrow or it's not dedicated.

hourly benchmarks confirm it's definitely DDR4 RAM, standard SATA SSD with acceptable IOPS, and decent enough network. it's the budget branch of the biggest hosting provider so maybe they can afford to. how long it lasts only time will tell

Any chance you can give the link? Can't really find anything :(