I'm not trying to be rude, just genuinely curious if I'm missing something complex that could be making my services less secure.
Every second you spend configuring web servers and stuff is a second you should be spending adding value to your business.
Cloud has much value but please dont' consider it a panacea.
You can get a lot of value out of those 30 minutes installing a webserver; and it can save you a significant amount of cost.
Not to mention when you want to actually scale you'll see the reason why pretty clearly, unlike in cloud providers where inefficiencies can just suck up money until you notice.
And I definitely take exception to the "every _second_ you spend doing something other than business is a waste" because by that logic I shouldn't use the bathroom or take time to have a coffee.
Your goal in a startup shouldn't be all about saving money like some cheapskate penny pincher. Penny wise, pound foolish.
Worrying about $100/mo in heroku bills instead of $10/mo "bobs budget webhost" bills is a waste of time. If your startup cannot afford $100/mo or even $1000/mo in infrastructure costs you probably should exist. Especially given smartly spent infrastructure costs (eg: using heroku) let you deliver value far faster than cobbling together infrastructure yourself.
Penny wise, pound foolish.
A dollar saved is a dollar earned. AWS is a terrible choice unless you have a huge amount of free credit. Also, an income of $4000/mo puts you into the average American household income bracket. Why would you throw away 25% of that on infrastructure to save 2 hours on the front end?
Not every startup needs to be the next Instagram. There are tons of people out there happy with their small and medium sized SAAS companies which have allowed them to leave the rat race.
Source: I worked there for years until very recently for this reason.