Put nginx in front of a bunch of Pis and load balance them! Just clone the SD card and distribute to a bunch of Pis. I mean, you'll have to scale horizontally at some point even on EC2 and it's roughly the same complexity. If the value prop of EC2 is hardware abstraction, I don't think it offers that much over Raspberry Pis, unless you are going for higher performing hardware.

This feels disingenuous, like pushing a DIY narrative, similar to what the OP is doing. Whether you think it offers value or not, a Rasberry Pi at home is _far_ from a cloud VPS. A cloud VPS is behind a net connection with an uptime SLA, has redundant power, can have an SLA of its own, is not NATed, has a fast NIC, and usually is low latency to transit to because of presence in an IX. If you're equating the two, you don't understand why datacenters exist. You can _reject_ this value, but you'd need to be clear about what your expectations are out of then IMO. It's fair to make a comparison between a coloed host or a VPS in another cloud service (like DO or Hetzner) with AWS because it comes with most of the above things (just usually worse transit), but to deny that there's value in a datacenter feels like willful ignorance.

Just FYI residential ISPs are absolutely terrible. Even my ISP, a FTTH one, has uptime lower than 99%. This is aside from layers of CGNAT and your own home equipment's SLA. If you're willing to run a product on this kind of RasPi infrastructure feel free, but don't claim there isn't any value in a datacenter.

My point is that a lot of people don't need all those things. As the article points out, a managed dedicated server offers most of those benefits and the redundancy plus "easy scaling" of AWS is not even necessary if your goal is just to avoid debugging hardware issues.

It's easy to setup a home raspberry pi. It's easy to go one step up and setup a colocated raspberry pi. It's easy to setup a managed dedicated server. Auto scaling virtually provisioned hardware is great for a big company like Netflix with actual daily fluctuating demand. Most people don't need such advanced scaling features.

I previously had Sonic.net, which was one of the best fiber offerings for consumers available. 1 gbps up and down, unmetered, and was pretty much never down during the period I had it.