Can't speak for xstartup, but if the dataset is 100+ GB then EBS, S3, etc start to cost real money. I host an application on AWS for a single customer with 10 active users which costs about $1500/month because there are several TBs of data and the nature of the application needs a lot of CPU and RAM. In other words, it depends on the use case and data size.

What? I have a 16TB raid that only costs 800$ a month. You should look into how you store that information.

Or stop making assumptions with very little information. That is really my point, but I didn't think it needed to be said explicitly.

I've seen burnt coffee that was roasted less than this.

Yep, that's right. We've not investigated cloud costs at all. If only, I get to have some calm days when my hair is not on fire. Maybe I just suck at development or need to hire really good dev ops team. For now, just single developer.

I've read a good book that taught me some good ways of managing time. 7 Habits of Highly Effective people

We just have really low latency requirements which matter to the customers we serve. And several TBs of clickstream data on which we perform real-time analytics. This is why we rewrote the main request server entirely in Go while we kept the frontend API in Ruby.