As of 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222006

  FreeBSD 10.1
  Nginx 1.7.10
  Racket 6.1.1 with some HN and FreeBSD specific patches.

  2x 3GHz Intel Xeon-IvyBridge (E5-2690-V2-DecaCore)
  8x16GB Kingston 16GB DDR3 2Rx4
  SuperMicro X9DRI-LN4F+_R1.2A
  Adaptec 71605
  9x 1000GB Western Digital WD RE4
  2x 200GB Smart XceedIOPS SSD

A minor upgrade these days:

  FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p4
  CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2637 v4 @ 3.50GHz

This "single box" has a lot of computing units as on AWS EC2.

That should tell you a lot about the price you pay for using AWS.

The figure I saw around maybe 2015 was that AWS (maybe Heroku) is 10x more expensive and bare metal is 10x more efficient/faster, lending a 100x difference in price-performance. Both factors are probably larger nowadays.

It's the convenience and the enormous ecosystem of plug and play services that make AWS do good for point and click building architectures.

You can do all of it locally (except multi zone and multi region reliability) but it would take a lot of configuration, skills and you wouldn't have the same Gui for everything.

AWS is not cheap but companies don't care, because without it, you have to pay to find experts and keep them happy, which is a lot harder.

Those figures are not in line with my understanding.

I'll try to find the article, I think it might have been Bitnami or Joyent who ran it.

Some older discussion on the topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3165095

Pentium II with 64mb of Ram is my assumption.

If it runs on a PII, but provides as much value as it does to all of us, I call it a very successful product.