Any companies successfully using dedicated servers instead of cloud?

I'm working at a company that does realtime content generation for emails/website, generally those are images but we are trying to do video now. The big problem we have are the cost of bandwith, specially for video (we are speaking about ~20MB video send to 1M users over 2-3h, you can eyeball it at ~2k$ just for the bandwith). So we decided to migrate to dedicated servers (still ongoing), better performance for a fraction of the cost (you can find 80e/month servers with 12cpu/64G ram at OVH for example) and no bandwith cost.

We already had experience with running bare metal infra (hashicorp stack), currently evaluating how to deploy it (currently using GKE). Althrough it should be straight forward since its mostly stateless workload, we it need to be able scale x10 in less than 1h sometimes so we might throw an node autoscaler that provision from cloud.

My current company is on prem. The reason is cost. Our workload requires lots of big machines, and is fairly inelastic. When we do need more machines, we know months ahead of time.

We recently just started the process of refreshing all the hardware. We looked at cloud again just to cover our bases. It is still cheaper to lease the hardware and pay for colo and a couple of people to manage the hardware, then to pay for the cloud.

Skroutz[1], a Greek price comparison website, uses a bare metal infrastructure[2] and has a strong engineering culture[3]. Skroutz is a success story in Greece and looks pretty solid.

[1]: https://www.skroutz.gr/

[2]: https://engineering.skroutz.gr/blog/skroutz-infrastructure-2...

[3]: https://engineering.skroutz.gr/blog/uncovering-a-24-year-old...

In finance, all the companies I've worked for/with run their critical infra on-prem. The only exception is my current company which needs cloud infr because of the size of data.

King, the makers of candy crush among other games. candy crush is the most popular mobile franchise with hundreds of millions of monthly active users.

Mostly on prem.

However they are moving workloads to cloud these days.

My knowledge might be outdated now, but Bloomberg empire is/was on-prem.

The Visual Effects industry is mostly on-prems. Compute, storage, memory and bandwidth are all very expensive.