The costs of the cloud are big and this author relates how the HackerNews community got confrontational with him.

He switched to Hetzner, because their costs are low:
80 cores @ 3 Ghz, 128 GB of RAM and 2TB of data for 170€ a month.

In comparison, AWS costs between 2 500$ to 3 500$.

The point here is that there’s value in managing your own servers VS just accepting the cloud as a given truth.

and people trying to convince you that "the cloud" is the solution never tried alternatives.

How did we get there?

The majority of devs are clueless or have forgotten. AWS started to give credits specifically for startups only. The entry is cheap, but the costs become expensive as they grow. They are locked-in so they will struggle to migrate to another architecture.

The cloud is only an option between others. "Most businesses are and will always be small, by a simple rule of power law."

Here’s a reference point: my current two-server setup serves millions of requests a day for millions of monthly visitors.

Managing your own server is fine because there has never been a better time to get good at servers. AI are very knowledgeable on Linux.