The thing is, maybe you're overpaying spending $100/month instead of $10/month, but those are both small numbers. Simply not having to standup a DB/server/getting certs/debug if something goes wrong somewhere/etc is worth more in my time than a few $100. If you're very small scale you can also use the "always free" tier of VMs.
I really like that for my side projects/solo hacks I don't have to think about anything other "here is my code that does the thing that I think is cool" and all the deployment/serving/data layer/ml model inference/etc just kind of happens.
For small/very early startups it's also similar. At least in the US, it's not the extra $5k/year you spend on cloud hosting vs doing it yourself that kills you; for many engineers that less than a week of comp.
At the same time, when you are large and spending $100s of k on your hosting then sure, look into alternatives and migrate if needed. This is where "start on AWS, then move" comes from.
I guess the point I was trying to make is that all that "extra" stuff isn't really much extra work at all and the same magic deploy tools could be just as easy on a VPS/bare-metal, but aren't because of $$profit$$ making it better that they don't make it super-easy to deploy on VPS/bare-metal.
I can make a script to do it all for me (and have in the past), but it's a bit of work.
That's really why the title of the article is apt being "the Amazon Premium", and not "the Amazon Rip-off".
I really like that for my side projects/solo hacks I don't have to think about anything other "here is my code that does the thing that I think is cool" and all the deployment/serving/data layer/ml model inference/etc just kind of happens.
For small/very early startups it's also similar. At least in the US, it's not the extra $5k/year you spend on cloud hosting vs doing it yourself that kills you; for many engineers that less than a week of comp.
At the same time, when you are large and spending $100s of k on your hosting then sure, look into alternatives and migrate if needed. This is where "start on AWS, then move" comes from.