It really depends on your demands; a lot of companies are running 1000s of trivial web applications and that’s it. Those can run on 10 year old servers which co

It really depends on your demands; a lot of companies are running 1000s of trivial web applications and that’s it. Those can run on 10 year old servers which cost nothing at all anymore and never break; I have a few racks of them (HP dl360). We have not had issues in our colo for those 10 years; I didn’t even replace a drive and these are mostly spinning. Sure cloud is easier and if you need things that aws offers then go for it; we run well on a few $100/mo. Our most sold/popular product costs (I did this calc because of another ‘cloud is great’ HN post a few months back) less than $1/mo to host and maintain and has 50k+ active users. I like and use aws but it makes no sense in many cases; I would rob myself running most of our products on it because they don’t require remotely anything that it offers. I think the ‘make a unicorn’ mindset messed up people’s bottom line understanding; making 10k-100k$ more profit seems pathetic to companies that raised 100m$. Thing is; that is real money and I definitely rather have dinner with my colleagues than send it to Amazon.