To be fair, with a proper autoscaling scheme in place these services should scale down significantly when not in use.

That being said, a big reason for using AWS/GCP is all the additional services that are available on the platform.. If the workload being run isn't that complicated, the hyperscalers are probably overkill. Even DO or Linode would be a better option under those circumstances.

AWS is perfect for large operations that value stability and elasticity over anything else.

It's very easy to just spin up a thousand extra servers for momentary demand or some new exciting project. It's also easy to locate multiple instances all over the world for low latency with your users.

If you know you're going to need a couple servers for years and have the hardware knowhow, then it's cheaper to do it yourself for sure.

It's also possible to use aws more efficiently if you know all of their services. I ran a small utils website for my friends and I on it a while ago and it was essentially free since the static files were tiny and on s3 and the backend was lambda which gives you quite a few free calls before charging.

Habit (guess). Its what is used professionally, despite being proven over and over that cost-per-speed is terrible compared to less known providers.

Hetzner ftw

AWS is mostly only useful for large companies who need one hosting provider for all their needs, with every single product tightly integrated into other products

The pricing scheme here is designed to gouge businesses for equal or more than the traditional non-cloud equivalent. Which happens to be completely unaffordable. Imagine buying a new enterprise grade server for your home setup.

The only advantage would come if you could rewrite lemmy to be serverless

Can you point the everyone else? Just out of curiosity. I know there’s digital ocean but I’m not quite sure they’re cheaper than azure/aws

Some of us have a capitalist bondage kink