We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS
They don't mention at all what services they were using (other than slight mention of S3) which makes it very hard to respond to this. If you are running everything on EC2 then you are going to have a bad time (especially if you aren't using reserved instances).AWS (IMHO) shines with the various services they provide (S3, Lambda, CloudFront, API Gateway, SQS< SES, to name a few). AWS is a game of trying to reduce your bill and often that means using AWS-specific services. If you want to stay completely "cloud agnostic" you are going to paying more than buying into a "cloud", in that scenario then you absolutely should be looking at dedicated servers. AWS is great because you can bring existing software and just run it in EC2 (or their container stuff if your software is containerized) but the AWS magic comes from using their managed services (also spinning up/down EC2 instances as needed, but if you are running them 24/7 then consider alternatives or at least pay for reserved).