> As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services. I use the credit card of my employer. For my own projects I use my own serve

> As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services. I use the credit card of my employer. For my own projects I use my own server for everything. Granted, it doesn't get much traffic. Some offers from cloud providers are pretty good. If you want to scale to more (virtual) machines, it can be more easily done with the usual providers. I also expect Amazon to know more about firewall and reverse proxy configuration, it renews my certificates automatically and has rudimentary services for monitoring of server state. There is a certain convenience to it. Would I recommend cloud based hosting? Absolutely not. You become dependent on the provider and prices are often steep. Even if you do not know much about server security, your unsecured s3 bucket will be far more exposed than your standard db installation on your own server. Better build expertise for systems you have full control over than to invest the time on the details of AWS which are more subjected to change.