I know about Servermonkey, and the prices there aren’t nice at all. I’m rather sticking with old servers with roughly the same specs, but perhaps twice the wattage and noise, which only run occasionally. The 24/7 stuff is already on a low-power footprint, though I don’t have a successor for that little Supermicro when it bites the dust. I’d rather pay way less than 1 kEUR for it.
Actually, these are mostly dual-socket boxes with lots of cores, ECC RAM and lots of 3.5", 2.5" spindles and SSDs, plus private storage networks, and such.
Instead of a NUC I run a 1U Supermicro 8-core Atom C2758 with 16 GB RAM and SSDs which is quite durable but will die eventually. With more modern hardware I meant something like that, only with onboard 10G and/or 50G (SFP+/SFP28/SFP56) with more and better cores as well as onboard NVMe along with frontal SAS/SATA slots. And of course some larger SSDs to populate these.
I had no problems communicating a higher limit. They are not AWS but you can get 100s of instances.