Bandwidth on S3 costs something like 50x what I'm usually paying for bandwidth (Hetzner etc.) or 5x what you'll get from smaller cloud providers.
You can be successful on AWS, but you're leaving money on the table, and for relatively commodity services it's just a question of time before a competitor realise they can do the same with much better margins and lower prices elsewhere.
If your hosting is a small portion of your costs, that might not matter, so I have certainly run services on AWS too, and do in my current job as well, but it's a very expensive convenience. I've yet to come across any systems I know the internals off that couldn't cut hosting costs by moving off public cloud services.
The "commodity" distinction feel very significant here. Parent mentioned training videos, so probably very much not commodity. If you're selling something at $10/unit, it doesn't matter if your bandwidth costs are ¢0.05 or ¢2.5/unit. You're technically leaving money on the table, yes, but probably not enough to justify the added infrastructure complexity.
> but probably not enough to justify the added infrastructure complexity.
If you want to avoid infrastructure complexity, I'd go for dedicated hosting most of the time. Most of my past clients have ended up paying for more hours on operations for AWS setups than for dedicated. AWS and similar tends to force a lot of ceremony, some of which is good, but a lot of which is unnecessary on dedicated setups or on premises setups.
But yes, if your costs per unit are that low, I've typically told clients it largely depends on what they're most comfortable with. Some then pick AWS and it's a perfectly good choice.
What I'm seeing though, is that a lot of people pick AWS without first pricing out the options, and then later end up with expensive migrations to get off it.
Yes, of course. "Added complexity" was meant in the context of already having decided that the AWS ecosystem is valuable (parent mentioned running serverless, so presumably that is the case).
Some businesses don't have IT staff or technical individuals, so cloud ends up being this nebulous resource that just works. Dedicated server means you are comfortable setting up your own servers to some extent. I agree with the comments thus far, you just need to be one of the technical people to appreciate the difference between cloud vs dedicated.
If it's one thing cloud services does not do, it is "just work". Companies lacking IT staff is a bonanza for devops consultants.
The difference is minimal these days, but usually my experience is that people spend more on devops for AWS. If you want to spin up a dedicated host at e.g. Hetzner or OVH or Softlayer or wherever, it generally take no more or less effort or technical skills than spinning up an instance at AWS. Many of the hosting providers have API's, just like AWS, only they expose their bare metal instead of hypervisor interfaces.
You don't typically need to know any more about the hardware on those systems than you need to know about the virtualized hardware on AWS.
I don't have the numbers here, but I'm pretty sure the same idea applies for serverless. If you have a predictable load, you can always find a much cheaper alternative once you pass a certain threshold. The cloud is never about cost, it's about flexibility.
Predictable or flat/consistent? If my load is negligible in US weekends and outside of business hours, that's a factor of 2 or 3 you can theoretically save over baseline=peak with some "cloud on demand" service.
It's not an order of magnitude, but it's something. Probably not worth the effort, for most, though, and I have no idea if "dedicated box" services can approximate something similar.
If you have a small number of requests over a large period, serverless is cheaper (that includes an api that is idle most of the time and peaks at a very high rate occasionally).
But once you go live and start to grow, there is a point where the lambda cost equals the instance price. And with an instance, you can almost always do a lot more than that number. Again, that will work if your requests are predictable enough that you can see this number consistently over a large period, say, every week at least.
You can be successful on AWS, but you're leaving money on the table, and for relatively commodity services it's just a question of time before a competitor realise they can do the same with much better margins and lower prices elsewhere.
If your hosting is a small portion of your costs, that might not matter, so I have certainly run services on AWS too, and do in my current job as well, but it's a very expensive convenience. I've yet to come across any systems I know the internals off that couldn't cut hosting costs by moving off public cloud services.