As someone who made one of the comparisons you're commenting on... > A lot of the comments here are comparing bare metal/virtual servers to a combination of tw

As someone who made one of the comparisons you're commenting on... > A lot of the comments here are comparing bare metal/virtual servers to a combination of two+ products with literally dozens of built in capabilities, security controls, built in scaling, monitoring, logging, deployment mechanisms, and built in high availability. These are not apples to apples comparisons in the least. Yes, I acknowledge that buying a pair of dedicated servers will not give me the things you mention however these things are coming at a cost and while they're nice to have, when you're running at a scale where a mere 2 baremetal servers can handle peak load, I'm dubious that you really need these things enough to pay ~2x to have them. > What now do you do for: high availability, nearly instant scalability, monitoring, logging, alarming, deployment and security controls. HA: OVH has load balancers too. Logging: Log to disk, rotate logs, compress them and send them to somewhere like S3 for further analysis with a cron job if desired. Monitoring + Alerting: You have competitors like NewRelic and DataDog, they're pretty trivial to set up. Alternatives can be self hosted when things get too expensive. Deployment: Depends on the app. Auto-updates on the servers and a private package repository could be enough. Security Controls: Depends entirely on the application. Though not everyone needs all these things and AWS adds $200/month in additional expense relative to baremetal, which is a lot of savings to be had. > Are you going to run all of your software on these 2-3 hosts? What happens when they go down? How quickly are you recovering? Are you going to run all your software on AWS? What happens when AWS goes down? How quickly is AWS recovering? You have to deal with these problems either way, AWS is no silver bullet and you're going to need to have disaster recovery plans either way. Most dedicated hosting providers I'm aware of will give you a basic SLA to start with and a better one can be purchased later. That covers hardware issues. Software issues are up to you but from the sound of things, the author's software is little more than a proxy. > How about patching the OS, the software you run on it, your tools, your languages/packages? Turn on unattended upgrades, pay a sysadmin a couple hundred bucks once every couple years to handle major upgrades if it's too scary to do yourself. I'm under no illusions that paying AWS is always the wrong idea but the benefits of AWS come at high cost and not everyone is willing to pay it. I'm certainly not. I pay $60/mo for a colo (let's say $100/mo factoring in hardware) and to get the same capabilities on AWS, I'd be paying $23k for bandwidth, $1.4k for disk and $152 for CPU/RAM (an m3.2xlarge on a 3-year reserved plan), for a total of ~$24500/mo, or 245x what I'm paying now and more than enough to pay 2 full time engineers if I so wished.