I run a number of personal projects on AWS entirely on their serverless offerings and pay $0 outside of domain registration as I'm well within their free tiers. That seems pretty cost effective.

Yes, and for bandwidth, AWS is closer to 100x overpriced.

You must be talking about renting resources that run 100% of the time. AWS rents us gpu instances by the second. We have to run sporadic jobs throughout the day that take 50 seconds to two hours. Depending on customer activity we might need to run 10 or more at once, or we might lie idle for an hour. The elastic economics are unbeatable.

so I have an HTTP endpoint which gets maybe 10 hits per day, and does some lightweight computations and records small amount of data.

Right now, this is done on AWS, with lambda + S3, and costs under $0.02/month.

Can you point me to something more cost effective that that? Don't forget I also need backup for data, automatic failover in case of machine failure or crash, amd no maintenance (like OS upgrades) for 5+ years.

Which hosting companies are there which are SoC-2 compliant and are 20 times less cost effective than AWS?

Enterprise workloads need compliance. AWS and GCP provide that. They are very few hosting companies out there who are better at security and compliance than those two.

Do you have the expertise and confidance to run at the same lvl as AWS does for cheaper?

Renting the same compute resources might cost you less but you are on the hook for maintenance and administration which can cost you more in the long run.

> Renting the same compute resources wholesale will cost you 20 times less. (Not a typo.)

You mean like S3 object storage? That costs less outside AWS because you are usually getting less. That's if you can get it at all.

sure they became a multi billion dollar business by not being cost effective