[koollman]

You seem to manage fine. I do think most projects do not need AWS, and at work we run most of our infrastructure on our own servers (colo, we rent racks and buy servers).

Remember to consider more annoying points that can often become hidden costs, or hidden risks: - backups (and more importantly, restores :) ) - maintenance and security (you are in charge of the lower levels too) - decent authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) - SLA, both 'in theory' (what does the contract with your provider say) and 'in practice' (how much would an interruption could cost you and what happens if the provider does not respect SLA at all) - how do you handle outages (ideally you want to have a plan to know what to do when the obvious things go wrong. Then for the non-obvious things) - how do you transfer knowledge to a potential new employee. Is there only one person that know how something works. (called 'bus factor')

And yes, most of those also apply if you use AWS, but typically they would cover different parts or have different risks. And usually some associated product you can pay to manage that risk