You are right but that does not really explain why you would spend so much money, masking incompetence usually. Like not having database indexes because 'the cloud scales' which I see all the time. And it does scale, running up bills for rds or dynamo to extreme amounts. And investor dd sees this as a positive, like 'spending as much as possible' somehow means things are going into the right direction. It can be, however, I think spending it like this is a weird trend.

I can see the upside for many things, but you can do that efficiently, not costing 5 figures.

Is that a real problem with a reputable bare-metal hosting provider? I agree that a fly-by-night VPS provider would be a major risk, but OVH for example is a major host in Europe (that successfully hosted websites long before the "cloud" was a thing). They have all the major certifications and have been in the business for two decades now and their uptime is solid.

The only risk I can see is the lack of managed services, but Postgres isn't that hard to manage yourself, and other value-add AWS services can still be used (the cost savings of your baseline load being on bare-metal would most likely still offset the bandwidth costs of moving data between AWS managed services and your bare-metal host).

I just call our OVH services "the could" to placate people.

Sure cherrypicking postgres since it has more experience as "on-prem". Try and replicate s3 type of service for me or something like sns - even without fancy stuff.

You can still use S3 even without being on AWS, though for more reasonable (< 1TB) amounts of data, old school local storage served by Nginx does the trick.

For SNS, what does it offer that RabbitMQ doesn't? I've always found RMQ to be rock-solid and wouldn't use SNS anyway.

Was part of a company that refused to use AWS.

We had migrate our servers 4 times as hosting company kept changing things, then getting purchased by IBM, then IBM was trying to figure itself out.

I didn’t kill the company, mostly due to a lot of really hard work. But it came close.