Lots of people sell things people don&#x27;t need. There&#x27;s something to be said for marketing.<p>Github and Stackoverflow, to name two that come to mind, run on their own hardware in a datacenter. Backblaze built out its own storage system in a datacenter due to how much cheaper it was than AWS&#x27; S3 system.<p>I think AWS is a wonderful system to prototype in, before you move to your own gear if you&#x27;re profitable. But every dollar you spend in AWS is gone once its spent; with new US Section 179 deduction rules, you can immediately write off $500K&#x2F;year in hardware costs. That means that you own that hardware forever. That might not matter to a Fortune 50 or 500 business, but it matters <i>a lot</i> to small to midsized businesses.<p>Disclaimer: I do devops&#x2F;infrastructure, and love AWS, but also don&#x27;t believe in spending more than you must for a solution.