[ceejayoz]

> Not having hardware is someone else's profit.

But it's also someone else's economies of scale. The chances of me getting datacenter space, hardware, bandwidth, and expert 24/7 staffing at the same volume discounts they do is... slim. Particularly for the small amounts I'd need.

[zer00eyz]

>> Particularly for the small amounts I'd need.

How small... ovh, hetzener are both a thing and cheap as chips if your VPS sized. You just have to plan ahead for what you're doing and how you want to scale it. It requires a bit more upfront thought... but if your on a budget (personal project scale) knowing that you have a FIXED COST is pretty good for sleeping easy at night.

[Nextgrid]

There's a middle ground - there are plenty of providers that will give you a turn key "insert credit card here, get root SSH access" experience similar to AWS EC2 but on physical hardware and at much smaller margins. See OVH, Equinix Metal, Hetzner, Packet, etc.

[bdcravens]

In most cases where your total needs are less than a dedicated server, you're probably correct. Once you hit that level, issues like network traffic, EBS volumes, etc, really start to creep that cloud bill up fast.

[nitwit005]

They may be enjoying economy of scale, but they aren't passing that along as savings to their customers. Why would you when people seem happy to pay high prices?