[watsocd]

renting small servers...much more sense even for small companies

No. At one time over 10 years ago, I had a dedicated server with one of the hosting companies. They charged me $225/month.

I moved to AWS and my cost dropped to ~$30/month. Even now, 10 years later, my total AWS bill for primarily EC2 and RDS services that runs an application that pays my bills is ~$75 per month.

If my company suddenly went viral and had a bunch of new customers, I could scale up instantly.

[eloff]

I'm not talking about hobby projects, which also aren't a great fit for AWS. Use digital ocean, vultr, or linode. I'm talking about startups with over $10k/year in spend.

[dragonwriter]

AWS (and ditto with the other major public clouds) can be a great fit for hobby projects because they can often fit in the free tier.

[beatrobot]

If you don't use any outgoing data transfer or just a little, it could make sense for smb.