no but it is sort of a factor in moving our startup up a level, under the theory that time is money.

The problem is we have free hosting from a friend whose business has so much AWS usage that ours is negligible, however to move up we should move and it is painful to consider doing the move since to get the same level of service that will require

setting up hosting somewhere - AWS, Digital Ocean, bizspark etc. Setting up Nginx Setting up Phusion doing routine maintenance

before we get to the next level stuff we want to do - Redis queuing to handle image conversions in-house (instead of relying on services which I don't think do a good enough job), GraphDB usage, and so on and so forth.

and even under the theory that money is also money, we are bootstrapping pretty hard right now, so even $50 a month is at least a consideration.

Not in my experience. You can start small and ramp up. I prefer to experiment using my own servers (mostly old minitowers and some ex data centre stuff). But for the MVP, replicate the working configuration to either AWS/GAE, etc.

Perhaps you could explain why you ask?

Bizspark. Free Azure for 3 years.

No, I just use a lower end VPS to start. My own personal blog I have been hosting with the same company for 14 years. I recently had to renew the hosting. That was quite a sticker shock for shared hosting.

If you are spending more then $100 a month then you are just buying too expensive of services unless if you are hosting a lot of data or images in which case then your costs can be exponential.

I have a website that would cost me about $600 on AWS, the site makes about Twice as much a month. Thats not exactly a startup but depending on what you do, its probably worth to think about it.

That's a pretty hefty hosting cost compared to revenue. Do you have a lot of non-paying users?

All of them actually plus the Application has some design flaws which eat up RAM like butter.

I also have to add that hosting costs me about 50€ right now, the same box which also hosts all my other services. My point is that i thought about it and got a rather cheap dedicated box, build up my own "hosting structure" on it, including load balancing and use Cloudflare which helps a lot when you have massive traffic. I could also use AWS for about $200, but when i would just purchase each service individually on AWS it would get very expensive fast.

No.. you can get huge dedicated servers for like $50/month.

Hosting is a non-issue. Our main cost is development time.