I put together a few dual E5-2683v3 machines for a colo lab earlier this year. Pricing looks a little less favorable today, but I'd ballpark around $1500 per 28 cores/56 threads before RAM and disk.
As for contracting, there's lots of options, but everything depends heavily on your usage model. Let's say your render jobs take the shape of "press button, enqueue 10,000 CPU-minutes of work". How often do you press the button? How valuable are low completion times? How penalizing are high completion times? Are there ever times when there is no work?
Cloud computing is a good fit for some problems: you can press a button, run your code on 10,000 CPUs, and finish the job in a minute. Cloud computing is expensive for other problems: in terms of hardware, the $1500 machine above compares favorably versus a cc2.8xlarge instance which costs about $1500/month at on-demand pricing. Server hardware is not the only cost -- you still need space and power and disks and network and time for setup and ongoing maintenance -- but there's definitely a break-even point.
PaaS, IaaS, dedicated servers, colocation, and in-house datacenters all make sense for users seeking different tradeoffs. It's difficult to give useful advice without knowing more about the tradeoffs you want to make and the relative values you place on setup time versus run time versus money.
As for contracting, there's lots of options, but everything depends heavily on your usage model. Let's say your render jobs take the shape of "press button, enqueue 10,000 CPU-minutes of work". How often do you press the button? How valuable are low completion times? How penalizing are high completion times? Are there ever times when there is no work?
Cloud computing is a good fit for some problems: you can press a button, run your code on 10,000 CPUs, and finish the job in a minute. Cloud computing is expensive for other problems: in terms of hardware, the $1500 machine above compares favorably versus a cc2.8xlarge instance which costs about $1500/month at on-demand pricing. Server hardware is not the only cost -- you still need space and power and disks and network and time for setup and ongoing maintenance -- but there's definitely a break-even point.
PaaS, IaaS, dedicated servers, colocation, and in-house datacenters all make sense for users seeking different tradeoffs. It's difficult to give useful advice without knowing more about the tradeoffs you want to make and the relative values you place on setup time versus run time versus money.