Right on both counts, but the pricing part is kind of how my MacBook is overpriced; they can afford to overcharge me because I have nowhere else to go that gives me the same returns for investment. i.e. It's both overpriced and worth what they're charging.

Yes I can do everything I'm doing in AWS cheaper and with less complexity, but I certainly don't _want_ to. Especially after you've gathered enough re-usable IaC in the bag, the complexity and price don't deter you.

Recently I tried hosting a static website on AWS with a catch: it should only be reachable from certain countries but remain reachable for the Google crawler. The original solution was working and simple and consisted of a python script that built a list ip adresses and a deny all statement in an .htaccess file.

Same setup on AWS: Identity center, AWS Organizations, SCPs, cloudtrail, cloudwatch, cloudfront and s3 with half a dozen Policies. The only tool available with fine grained IP Access restrictions is WAF which costs alone almost 10x what one would pay with the hoster.

This is common knowledge by now. There are use cases where the "cloud" definitely makes sense, but it is nowhere near the current state of adoption.

If you don't think about things like cost and complexity, yes it is easy to build complex solutions that are costly.

If you are conscious about designing a simple solution, which can help cost, and then review the cost at scale, then it can be very worthwhile to use cloud services.

Editing to say that solutions recommended by cloud vendors may not always be the simplest, nor more cost effective.

My deployment for the hobbies project:

    DOCKER_HOST=ssh://mydomain docker-compose up -d

Thanks to investing into k8s I was able to migrate a non trivial production with minimal downtime between cloud providers 3 times now, who offered us free credits, without too much friction.

Can't hear this nonsense anymore...

The matter expert of AWS will click a few vms and a managed database in a few minutes enabled snapshots and is done (and not really an expert)

The matter experts in a self hosting company will setup something. They might know how to do it right but probably not.

And just because I can do it myself very good, a lot of people can't.

The DB experts in my experience were to 80% people barely even getting databases right and the last 20% were the real experts keeping the shit running

And even in big companies I have seen shitty infra teams. Old software versions of the management tool, missing features, exorbitant cross charging, not enough hardware etc.

Is self hosting cheaper? Yes.

Should you do it?

Yes if you can afford good people and take it serious.

Don't blame cloud. You are not on cloud if you would be smart enough and capable enough of doing so anyway.

Both true but then again the opportunity cost of managing all on your own is not worth it most of the time.