Granted, that's the bottom of the barrel (single disk, no IPKVM etc.), but $100 keeps you running for over a year. Better servers are easily available as well, usually a couple of times cheaper than AWS.
Is this a US thing? Based on HN only, I'd never know there's anything between the public cloud and racks of own hardware that you have to wire up and maintain.
I have a bunch of quad core 32 GB machines with dual 480GB SSDs for less than $100/month each (and that's a rather expensive provider with great support, you'll cut the price almost in half with e.g. SoYouStart).
Yes, AWS is convenient, but it's far from the only thing in the world.
Saying that they should run on kumsufi is like explaining to a wholesale company that they should use motorbikes instead of trucks, because motorbikes are cheaper.
Kimsufi is still dedicated hardware (however low-end) that costs 1 figure instead of 5/6. For normal server-grade hardware it's just 5x cheaper than AWS, not 20x.
Again, you're arguing for motorbikes instead of trucks because they are cheaper. Noone care about that, trucks were not selected based on costs in the first place.
We've been taught to build distributed system with unreliable componens and temporaral JIT eventual consistency.
Of course we can run production cloud-scale operations on unreliable systems. And single power supplies without ECC or RAID is pretty low on my list of things that cause outages. Most big hadoop/cassandra shops are running without raid and without redundant power.
AWS is not a magical PCI compliance button.
The utter lack of imagination that I see on HN when people are judging others’ technical decisions is kind of hilarious.
Tech stuff isn't hard. The biggest problem is the lack of capacity planning and project communication in tech today. Nimble startup is a euphemism for pure anarchy and chaos. No one wants to plan anything any more.
Cloud services are not efficient or cheap, they're convenient for the unprepared and haphazard management style that VC's love.
You may still disagree in the end, but you should come to the conclusion that it is not categorically stupid for some companies to choose to pay much more over time so that they can pay a lot less right now.
You can patch various tiers of servers at your own leisure, depending on threat levels and exposure. Measure the impact, capacity plan, etc. Rather than it being forced on you across all tiers because cloud.