If you can plan your hardware capacity, which is not that hard for a simple website like HN, it becomes far more cost effective to run on real hardware, even wi

If you can plan your hardware capacity, which is not that hard for a simple website like HN, it becomes far more cost effective to run on real hardware, even with a large overhead. This is quite hard for startups to do, because their core function is to keep adding and removing features, experimenting and scaling, and the initial cost of buying hardware to support these functions is too large. This plus all the services provided by AWS et al. saves a lot of time and effort. Nothing to do with "cloud" vs "non-cloud".