Have you ever been on-call for any project larger than a toy? If you have, you likely noticed that keeping the whole thing up sometimes takes effort, more effort than meets the eye.

Hosting as in having some code deployed to some machines is indeed cheap. Keeping a large app like g.docs up and running, especially without breaking the bank, is a bit more tricky.

> Have you ever been on-call for any project larger than a toy? If you have, you likely noticed that keeping the whole thing up sometimes takes effort, more effort than meets the eye.

Of course, that applies to literally every piece of production software ever, but keeping a webpapp running really isn't that hard, it's honestly the bare minimum of competent software development, if you have a team of SREs up at 3am triaging the site every night you're doing something wrong. Now of course, when you get to google scale, you will encounter unique problems, but if you're at google scale your business has more than enough revenue to pay for the costs.

My experience as well. Web apps - if made slightly streamlined and lightweight - with thousands of visitors a month is easy peasy on cheap webhosting. Google is another scale ofcourse. That's like comparing elephants with mosquitos.

Hosting is at an all time low, while innovation, time and putting time to a project like this is not.

There's more to hosting than just spinning up a fleet of containers you know (not even that that is necessarily trivial...).

Also, how would you be generating revenue from these users? Just do what google does and run ads on the side? Then what's the difference?

Ofcourse there's more to hosting. But that's what the hosting company does! The webhosting landscape - at least here in Europe - is perfect: worldclass technology, local service. I can be on the phone with these companies if there's a problem.

> There's more to hosting than just spinning up a fleet of containers you know (not even that that is necessarily trivial...).

Spinning up containers is like the bare minimum I'd expect from an ops engineer, I wouldn't call it "trivial" but it's the job.

> Also, how would you be generating revenue from these users?

That's a business question, not an engineering one, if the businesses doesn't have a plan for revenue then hosting costs are irrelevant.

Hosting stuff that hosts content some people find "problematic" has its own additional layers of difficulty. Amazon is completely willing to dump you if they disagree with you.

There are a few cases of this happening, but it's not common. If you intend to host "problematic" content pick a more understanding host or colocate.