Self-Hosting Still Pays
I see so often developers state something along the lines of, &quot;We need to go with AWS!&quot; (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is &quot;scalability&quot;.  99% of the time, what they&#x27;re building not only doesn&#x27;t need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it&#x27;s always inherently cheaper.<p>Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like DigitalOcean or Amazon LightSail.  I know, LightSail is still AWS.  But it&#x27;s not going to automatically increase the bill by 300% because someone accidentally toggled something in AWS&#x27;s byzantine admin console.<p>When (&quot;if&quot; is more often the case) that client starts to see the kinds of traffic that necessitates a full-scale AWS build out then I&#x27;ll advise them of their options.  By that point, they&#x27;re actually generating real revenue and, as importantly, they didn&#x27;t pay me to prematurely optimize a product that wasn&#x27;t yet generating any revenue, which helped them succeed.