&gt; And then the developer says &quot;hey we&#x27;ll just use AWS because thats what HN all suggest and it&#x27;s cheap&quot;<p>Never understood this, except from developers who&#x27;ve never actually had to pay for anything out of their own pocket.  AWS is nice, and has a place.<p>And I do hear it from people, a lot.  It&#x27;s cheap compared to buying your own hardware and dedicated staff, yes.  But for a lot of the standard webapp stuff you might want to do starting out, it&#x27;s not as cheap as just getting a dedicated VPS someplace.<p>I&#x27;ve been independent&#x2F;self-employed for a long time, and while I use various AWS services (including EC2 for some projects), it&#x27;s rarely ever cost which is the driving factor when AWS is chosen.  But it&#x27;s because the $ is coming, directly or indirectly, from me.