The true costs of hosting in the cloud

AWS is really the cheapest solution if you want a (somewhat) reliable computing infrastructure and if you don't have some unique requirements. Even large companies can't beat it easily.

The main attraction is that hardware management is Someone Else's Problem. This can not be overstated. If your AWS instance has a problem then simply stop it and then resume it to get it moved to a different hardware node. No messing around with remote hands in a DC or waiting for a replacement part to arrive.

Then there's a question of disaster preparedness. It's easy to run servers in several AWS regions. You'd be hard-pressed to do that using colocated servers.

And there are other goodies, like you can use EC2 Spot or Google Preemptible VMs to get dirt-cheap capacity if you need some number crunching. Or you can use AWS Lightsail as a replacement for dodgy VPS providers.

Now, AWS does have an Achilles heel - it's the high price of outbound data transfer. If you need to serve a lot of content, you might be better off running your own hosts and making your own interconnect agreements with tier ISPs.