Running my site on dedicated servers costs me $500 a month, running it on AWS would cost me about $20,000 a month (probably just for the egress traffic alone).

Running my site on dedicated servers costs me $500 a month, running it on AWS would cost me about $20,000 a month (probably just for the egress traffic alone). I could hire four system administrators for that money to look after each of my four dedicated servers full time. On top of that you first need to learn AWS. That thing is complicated - but I can set up a dedicated server in minutes because it's indistinguishable from my development environment. I joke that dedicated servers are only expensive if your time and money are worthless. Because AWS is going to eat both.