[Dunedan]

> > "Racked up a several-hundred-thousand dollar bill in a couple of hours."

> This is enough to rent big server from Hetzner / OVH for like forever and have person looking after it with plenty of money left.

That's no fair comparison, as you're comparing the cost of a worst case caused by a misconfiguration under very specific circumstances with the cost it takes to operate the service without such a worst case.

If you want to avoid any possibility to generate costs like that by accident you of course are better off with self-hosting. However even then generating such costs is certainly possible, e.g. by accidentally leaking a database with customer data through a misconfiguration.

Without assuming such worst cases AWS Lambda can be much more cost efficient than a dedicated server, depending on the use case.

There is no silver bullet. For some use cases self hosting makes sense, for other use cases using a cloud provider is the better choice.