A B2B app that has at most 10 concurrent requests can run on the smallest EC2 instance whether it's written in PHP or written in C++.
Bandwidth doesn't change with language choice and neither does the storage requirements of your app so those billable items don't come into the equation either.
So the CPU cost can effectively be dropped off of 95% of the apps out there today. At that point your main variable cost between C++ and something like PHP/Javascript is going to be the cost of development. All I can say to that is that it's a lot harder to find developers who can write C++ web apps at the same pace as developers slinging PHP for web apps. There is a reason Facebook uses a PHP derivative for huge portions of its web backend.
So maybe the question we should ask ourselves is: why isn’t there a smaller, cheaper EC2 instance (or any other provider than AWS) ?
This industry is tailoring the levels. Of course it’s understandable because, well, they live on it. And they count on small instances to share hardware ressources to overbook said hardware.
And I don’t blame them for that, I’m doing the same on my own bare metal servers, hosting multiple websites for clients and making money on it.
But I have the feeling that there is a lot of ressource loss somewhere in it, just for the sake of loosing it because it’s easier. Maybe I’m wrong.
AWS LightSail.
... also the t1.micro is small and cheap. Could you give some concrete numbers?
I get a lot of mileage serving a lot of content for several domains on a free Google Cloud Platform f1 micro instance. I also prefer GCP when I need a lot of compute for a short time.
Hetzner has always been my choice when I need more compute for a month or two. For saving money for VPSs OVH and DO have also been useful but I don’t use them very often.
In a world where you are billed by ressources used, wouldn’t it be a good idea to have light and fast services that don’t consume those ressources ?
I’ve been wondering this for a time now.