If all you need is Virtual Machines, stay with such a cheaper platform, that's not what you're getting AWS (or the other big ones) for. You get them for the my

If all you need is Virtual Machines, stay with such a cheaper platform, that's not what you're getting AWS (or the other big ones) for. You get them for the myriad of other managed services they provide, which let you build stuff that would otherwise take months, in days. The catalogue of AWS services is probably over 200 already, EC2 is just one of them. Building on a cloud like that is much more "gluing together legos using Terraform and some code" than the alternative. Configuring and maintaining open source solutions is a lot of work. Building everything yourself is too. I prefer to pay for AWS instead.