developer costs >> infrastructure costs
An AWS large server is around $500/year, which is about 1-2 developer hours (with taxes, overhead, etc) at the cost scales last time I priced this out. That's crazy expensive in the absolute, but if it saves a couple of hours, it makes sense.
PaaS providers cost even more. I've gone with those in the past, since it basically eliminated dev-ops. The major downside wasn't cost, so much as flexibility.
Dedicated servers start to make sense for:
- The very low end (e.g. personal use, or hosting something long-running for a small business)
- The very high end (e.g. once cloud costs start to hit hundred of thousands of dollars per year)
On the very high end, cloud providers will often cut a deal, though.
My problem with AWS, recently, has been reliability. Servers crash or have performance degradation a bit too often. That leads to developer costs, and might be what pushes me back to dedicated.
