That's one reason. Some others:

1 - Free credits

2 - No one ever got fired for buying IBM

3 - AWS is sold to CTO/CIOs. AWS is a massive marketing and sales success

4 - An entire job type has sprung up around cloud-complexity. These people have a vested interest is staying on cloud.

5 - Growing number of people think the choice is exclusively between cloud or colo.

6 - Entire generations brought up on cloud: a lot of people don't realize just how expensive cloud is.

> 3 - AWS is sold to CTO/CIOs. AWS is a massive marketing and sales success

Not always. People on the ground push for cloud stuff because it makes their lives easier and they are used to it from their side projects (where they, more likely than not, used the generous free credits).

It's just like back in ye olde days when all you needed to do to get a copy of Photoshop was the official installer and a keygen... Adobe didn't invest much in marketing and didn't do much against piracy until the end of CS6/the rise of CC, simply to become the universal industry standard.

Obviously 5 is really only a problem when you get into enterprises that have enough servers and monthly spend to where it would make more sense to invest in the overhead that is having your own servers.

> 6 - Entire generations brought up on cloud: a lot of people don't realize just how expensive cloud is.

Ah, so true. Heroku was my "solution" for so long, when its really so expensive on its own. All the pricing models are so messed up.

I have some Digital Ocean nodes at either $5 or $20/mo, I need to shut those down.

Deploying stuff that can communicate to other stuff is so easy right now and so cheap ... somewhere. Vercel to the rescue, for now.

> 6 - Entire generations brought up on cloud: a lot of people don't realize just how expensive cloud is.

The same people who know it’s expensive seem to not know how cheap it is.

If we're talking low amount of traffic, then maybe cloud is cheaper than dedicated. But for anything medium to high amount of traffic, cloud will always end up more expensive, or you have some unique use case where cloud is actually cheaper than dedicated over time?

If we are only considering traffic then sure AWS can be expensive. Costs me $730 for 17TB of data at the moment. But looking at where money is being saved. 6 ec2 instances previously was $648.24/m, now its $6.82/m after moving to Step Functions / Lambda's, and it just works better as there's no fighting for resources anymore.

You know whats expensive in AWS. S3 Storage. Got some odd ~500TB stored in there. But at 6k/m I can't imagine trying to keep that in dedicated hardware. Atleast in S3 I feel it's safe.

A lot of hobby and or small websites and business could benefit from a pay-per-ms model like AWS Lambda.

It's literally pennies in some cases, vs. renting a server that sits idle 99% of the time.

What "hobby and or small websites and business" deal with medium to high amount of traffic? Those seems to strictly fall into the "low amount of traffic" bucket.

Besides, you could either rent a $5/month VPS that you know will always be $5/month, or you can use AWS Lambda and never know what your bill is gonna be at the end. Your new blogpost hit frontpage of HN? Good news, your bill is now $40 for this month.

Most (85% maybe) of my clients I work with want consistent costs over cheaper costs.

A can rent a few €/month VM that is idling all the time but who cares, or struggle developing with AWS Lambda and risk paying orders of magnitude more.

All excellent points.

Yeah, but for compute or bandwidth intense businesses, you might not need IAM, unified enterprise billing, or the "engineering experience".

I helped a niche API-as-a-service company go from -20% margins to being profitable. How? Moving away from AWS to Hetzner.

Administration is not free. Given today’s risks I really doubt a small scale company can afford in-house properly secured hosting/storing of anything valuable.

Yes your monthly bill is lower, but now the liability is all yours.

These types of comments constantly come up. It's a false dichotomy. Following HN guidelines, I'll assume best intention rather than trolling or FUD.

There are other options than the two that you've described - namely VPS providers and dedicated providers.

Can you help me understand why you thought those were the only two options? Maybe people who joined the industry after, say ~2010, were primarily exposed only to AWS?

I don’t think anyone is saying that VPS and dedicated server providers aren’t an option. Rather, most startups rule them out since, if you grow enough to where the administration control of the Cloud is warranted, that past decision now warrants a host migration and the month+ of planning that goes into that. Unless the company really started as a side-project whose main funding was extra cash from the founder, it doesn’t make sense to artificially limit your growth.

Once more, it’s not like AWS is absolutely nothing. Chances are that any web-based startup would indeed be able to take advantage of the many autoscale-as-a-service features of AWS, enabling them to handle the next quarterly 100x increase in customers and throughout.

Feels to me like you have zero experience scaling outside the big cloud provider as this is simply not true

I'm only talking about why you would choose a cloud provider over VPS/dedicated, not that they're the only possible choice if you want to scale, so I don't see what is "not true" about my comment.

>These types of comments constantly come up

because triple++ digit margins enable cloud service providers to allocate vast amounts of money towards marketing.

Give us your contacts to us to receive our gift cards then.

You don't need in house hosting. Managed hosting at smaller providers almost always beats AWS by a huge margin. There are valid reasons to pick AWS but cost is almost never one of them - it's the expensive luxury option.

Anectodal: I work for a small scale company and we've just moved from self-hosted GitLab to GitHub for exactly this reason, after our (not-patched-since-eternity-because-no-one-has-time) GitLab servers got infected and started participating in a [D]DoS attack.

Unrelated to the original post, but why not go from hosted gitlab to SaaS gitlab? As someone who has used both, I would have stuck with gitlab, even if it was simply to keep things as similar as possible for engineers.

We were actually deciding between GitHub and GitLab, and think GitHub in the long run was better as it's now owned by a giant like Microsoft which I'd trust more in terms of company size and stability. I know it's kind of a capitalistic view, but I have to think about my own (projects') security/safety and letting MS host feels safer than letting GitLab host.

If your service goes down then, usually customers aren't impressed by you screaming about it being some suppliers fault and it being their liability.

My point is that you can't outsource reputational damage and blame.

You can outsource it, at least partially, by buying the market leader, i.e. AWS or previously IBM.

When my service is down and my competitor's isn't, the customers don't care that "it's ok, it's because I chose the market leader and they're having an outage".

My customers don't have a contract with AWS. A service they're paying for is down, and what am I going to do about it?

Your customers cannot sue you for reasonable downtime. Your contract always has a downtime clause, and nobody is promising 100% availability.

But they can sue you to bankruptcy if you mess up with their data. And these incidents happen way too frequently, even to big players, to ignore them.

You cannot casually say I am able to setup a Linux box myself, no need to hire experts / outsource this task to experts.

IMO, you're mostly paying for the future value of having your ecosystem in aws. It's nice being able to leverage the things aws provides without an additional switching cost.

Some other reasons to pay extra charges are: Trust, Compliance and Competency. When AWS says my RDS is backed up and point in time recovery is available, I can trust that it is really available. In self hosted databases, admins sometimes make mistakes and data is lost.

I really like that analogy