Consider the use case of the enterprise and larger scaled out services. Very few VPS providers will give you guarantees on isolated data centers in each region

Consider the use case of the enterprise and larger scaled out services. Very few VPS providers will give you guarantees on isolated data centers in each region (availability zones) along with the huge list of compliance programs AWS is certified for. On top of that servers are only a small piece of the AWS universe. Application services (Storage, managed replicated DBs across AZs, managed APIs, streaming, IoT, CDN, identity management...) , and serverless containers and functions are mostly unavailable on small VPS providers. As a solo developer, you don't encounter problems of scaling your engineering team and hiring devops engineers because you are doing everything yourself. The moment you have to hire expensive developers/devops all this starts making sense. But even for solo/smaller accounts, many people are using AWS as a jump host with a programmable whitelist to reach their VPS boxes. Why? Because AWS security is likely best in the world - they spend massive amounts of money on this and many banks and even government services run on them. (And even if you did us it only to scale servers, you don't need to click a button :) AWS autoscaling is finely programmable on all kind of application metrics even custom ones. Or by time of day: many teams routinely scale down their UAT and DEV clusters at night and weekends to zero with an autoscaling rule, more than halving server costs.)