cloud or dedi for growing hosting provider

[TommyCS]

Hi

Would it better for a growing hosting provider to keep managing each dedicated server to separate risks but have full licensing costs for each or should they rather go to the cloud? The prices seem so much higher for cloud than for dedicated servers.

Would building ones own cloud make any sense (imagine you get extremely competitive prices for dedicated servers)?

Which software would easily allow to 'plug in the servers' and create a single large entity that could be managed like one huge/growing machine into which one would install cloud linux, control panel, malware scanner, imunify360, etc?

Thanks!