Our small team spends roughly $40-50k/mo at AWS. If you're just hosting a website with a SQL database (glorified LAMP stack), you're probably in it for the wrong reasons. Stick to a dedicated box or DigitalOcean etc.

AWS is like co-locating your hardware, and then the data center having 1000s of employees offering highly reliable services you can access from your infrastructure that lets you move WAY faster for things that are hard to do.

e.g. Discussion today was increasing log retention. 10 years ago I would have run the numbers, extended some SAN volumes, considered procuring more NetApp shelves, etc.

Today it's simply a cost question: is it worth it to us to store those logs for 10x longer? Sure? Ok, done.