Hector Martin

Someone asked me why I didn't put my personal web server on AWS instead of on Hetzner. Because on AWS it would be 10x more expensive for the same specs. The cloud makes *no* sense for personal 24x7 "it just does its thing" long-term workloads.

The cheapest dedicated servers go for €15-€25/mo. €25 on Hetzner gets you a 4C8T Xeon, 16GB RAM, 2x3TB HDD, unlimited traffic €25 on AWS gets you 1C2T, 2GB RAM, 200GB storage, 1GB out/mo before they start charging extra

The cloud's great if you're a company with money to burn, or need hourly/minutely pricing, or dynamic scaling, or just want to use all those managed services they offer and not have to deal with admining them.

It's not just having money to burn really, if you can save even 20% of a single engineer's productivity, you've saved like $10-20K/year (depending on how well you're paying). Simple value prop if you're a company.

Yes, but you're not saving anything if your use case is a single server you throw software on a la classic sysadmin. The value prop makes more sense when you start throwing all of the other managed services on top.

Mostly agree. Can maybe make a case even for just EC2: you can make it significantly easier for people to setup isolated dev environments for example ("just spawn more instances!"), vs. having to manage a shared deployment somewhere.