[virmundi]

Cost. Linode is cheaper than AWS if you are willing to do your own ops. Lack of vendor lock in. Yes, AWS provides load balancing. When you look at their offerings they hook you by offering thing their way. You can use AWS messaging or run Rabbit. Many people start to adopt AWS since they are deployed there rather than thinking about doing things on their own.

[softwaredoug]

+1 to vendor lock-in. Being an AWS shop can start feeling like being a Windows shop in the 90s... it can creep up on you. You mostly have an open source app and slowly start acruing bits of AWS only functionality. A bit of SQS here... S3 here... Lambda there.

Before you know it your giant app is stuck on proprietary infra and core business functionality involves paying a significant tax to keep things operational.

I’m a big fan of hosted open source for this reason. But those hosts too have incentives to sell you proprietary “value add” functionality.