Even if you're running everything else serverless and have no compute time at all?
I know a VOD training service runs serverless with videos on S3 and they're very successful.
I know a VOD training service runs serverless with videos on S3 and they're very successful.
You can be successful on AWS, but you're leaving money on the table, and for relatively commodity services it's just a question of time before a competitor realise they can do the same with much better margins and lower prices elsewhere.
If your hosting is a small portion of your costs, that might not matter, so I have certainly run services on AWS too, and do in my current job as well, but it's a very expensive convenience. I've yet to come across any systems I know the internals off that couldn't cut hosting costs by moving off public cloud services.
If you want to avoid infrastructure complexity, I'd go for dedicated hosting most of the time. Most of my past clients have ended up paying for more hours on operations for AWS setups than for dedicated. AWS and similar tends to force a lot of ceremony, some of which is good, but a lot of which is unnecessary on dedicated setups or on premises setups.
But yes, if your costs per unit are that low, I've typically told clients it largely depends on what they're most comfortable with. Some then pick AWS and it's a perfectly good choice.
What I'm seeing though, is that a lot of people pick AWS without first pricing out the options, and then later end up with expensive migrations to get off it.
Oh if that isn’t a perfect description of AWS I don’t know what is. Every time I look at AWS, that’s what I discover.
The difference is minimal these days, but usually my experience is that people spend more on devops for AWS. If you want to spin up a dedicated host at e.g. Hetzner or OVH or Softlayer or wherever, it generally take no more or less effort or technical skills than spinning up an instance at AWS. Many of the hosting providers have API's, just like AWS, only they expose their bare metal instead of hypervisor interfaces.
You don't typically need to know any more about the hardware on those systems than you need to know about the virtualized hardware on AWS.
It's not an order of magnitude, but it's something. Probably not worth the effort, for most, though, and I have no idea if "dedicated box" services can approximate something similar.
But once you go live and start to grow, there is a point where the lambda cost equals the instance price. And with an instance, you can almost always do a lot more than that number. Again, that will work if your requests are predictable enough that you can see this number consistently over a large period, say, every week at least.