I suspect that this is really about liability. When AWS goes down you can just throw up your hands, everyone's in the same boat. If your own server goes down you worry that your customers doubt your competence.

Nobody gets fired for hiring IBM. This is the new version, when you go down because AWS did its someone else’s fault. Of course AWS will compare their downtime to industry standards for on premise and conclude they are down less often. On Premise engineers can say until they are blue that their downtime is on a Sunday at 3 am because it doesn't impact their customers it doesn't seem to matter.

On the other hand when Google mail gies down, I am happy to be in yhe same boat as 2 B people, waiting for the page to refresh.

As opposed to be with the small provider round the corner who is currently having a beer and will look at that tomorrow morning.

Now - I am in the phase where I ap seriously considering to move my email from Google to a small player in Europe (still not sure who) so this is what may ultimately be my fate :)

The difference is that if AWS goes down, I know for a fact that it'll be back up without me doing anything.

If my own dedicated server goes down, I'm going to need to call my admin at 3am 10 times just to wake him up.

You know that AWS will come back up. You definitely don’t know whether your own instances will come back or if you’ll need to redeploy it all.

Why do you assume that the small dedicated server has a higher probability to come back?

If youe admin isn't competant enough to setup logging or notifications, how is it going to be better when your Cloud VM runs out of storage or doesn't reboot properly due to AWS swapping out hardware?

When us-east-1 goes down, half the internet goes down with it.

Customers call and complain about downtime, I can just vaguely point at everything being on fire from Facebook to Instagram to online banking sites.

They get it.

When the self-hosted server fries itself, I'm on the hook for fixing it ASAP.

I guess you sip coffee, watch true crime on yt and tell everyone there is a global outage while aws us-east-1 fixes it compared to burning the midnight oil when you are the one fixing it. Totally worth paying 10x when that happens.