Comment by wongarsu

1 day ago

The difference from the big clouds is that an equivalent instance at AWS costs 10x as much. If you go with few beefy servers AWS offers very little value for the money they charge, they only make sense for "cloud native" architectures. But if you rent raw servers from traditional hosters you can get prices much closer to the amortized costs of running them yourself, with the added convenience of having them in a certified data center with 24/7 security, backup power, etc.

If you want more control than that, colo is also pretty cheap [1]. But I'd consider that a step above what 95% of people need

https://www.hetzner.com/colocation

For me the comparison was not against the specific instance of AWS but cloud in general, and AWS was a for instance. Which was the whole reason why I brought up compliance and stuff—it is much cheaper to have someone else handle that for you (even if it is hetzner!). That was my whole point.