Azure and the Cloud.

'The cloud is just someone else's computer'.

The cloud certainly has it's place, a good choice for a number of solutions. But it is not a panacea, there are many cases where having your own physical server is the way forward.

If your system is 100% in-house, why put it in the cloud when it can be run locally, less worries about security, performance is normally better as the requests are local rather than going out to the internet.

I am happy working on cloud based solutions, I won't recommend them blindly just because it's in vogue to do so. I have seen fashions come and go in my 30+ years in IT, for me one of the best ways of describing the cloud is like cars, do you lease, do you own, if you lease a number of issues stop being your problem, but you will pay for that privilege.

The way the costs work on cloud based solution may work for a lot of companies, others may find they are spending significant time every month scrutinising bills.

This website is hosted on my own equipment, all I needed was a small computer, Windows installed (with IIS although you don't need this), a static IP address on your internet connection, DNS domain name, a certificate and database.