> If you're "cloud-agnostic" and could migrate away from AWS in the blink of an eye then you're paying for an overpriced VM offering and should probably migrate to a cheaper hosting provider immediately.

No this is what everyone suggesting this does not get. The offerings are not equivalent.

There are a baseline of services that the cloud providers offer that can be made functionally-equivalent. It's not just EC2 but more like EC2,S3,Lambda,RDS,DynamoDB,ECS,EKS (plus some others and of course the other cloud's equivalents). The secret sauce is in the APIs and permisioning and all of these available within the same VPC (talking to each other without paying bandwidth costs).

"Cloud-agnostic" has _never_ meant "just VMs". Some of these services are majorly hard to duplicate on your own VMs as well. Feel free to implement "cheap VM hosting + S3" and burn cash on transit costs.

Cheaper hosting providers do not give you this by miles.

> all of these available within the same VPC (talking to each other without paying bandwidth costs).

That's one of the real key issues, I think.

If bandwidth is 10x cheaper, then maybe you decide it's fine if only half your inter-server bandwidth is free.

It's always worth measuring/understanding your application because likely it's not "half" but skews heavily one way or the other (in vs out).

It’s not super hard to run your own s3 or peer with wasabi and pay flat transit rate (probably like 10x cheaper than your s3 egress)