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.