Ya. I’ve worked in data enters.
I’ve found that when it comes to hosted services, it’s cheaper to build it in house about half the time.
Those were in a private datacenter.
Yes hosting can be more expensive if you already have a datacenter. If you don’t have a datacenter then its usually cheaper.
With the cloud based servers it can be much cheaper. I have go out and have a server built with OS in under 5 minutes. For a low end server running a web app and database it costs me about $25 bucks a month.