Ok, so the AWS bill is roughly $1,500 per company. That includes CDN, DNS, backup/restore, load balancing, serverless functions, database hosting, geographic redundancy, file storage, firewall, log aggregation, a data warehouse shared memory cache, web servers and utility servers. I'd estimate each company could probably host all of it on four or five dedicated servers, and let's say we got the deal of the year on dedicated hosts: $50 per server. So, the hosting bill is $250/month. That leaves $1250 to manage everything and staff for operations on nights and weekends. Since the number of servers is small, there's no geographic redundancy, so we're at higher risk of an outage. There's a huge advantage here, and the truth is that over time, prices have went down, not up for cloud services.
The priceless part is that I'm not ever on call, for most server problems, and my tech team has a much higher quality of life because they are not on call on nights and weekends either.
The flipside is that other company, the one where dedicated servers/colocation made perfect sense. The infrastructure is smaller needing only backup/restore, web server, load balancer, database server. The hosting company can easily handle most of the commodity issues, and our team is only really managing application deployment, so it works.
The priceless part is that I'm not ever on call, for most server problems, and my tech team has a much higher quality of life because they are not on call on nights and weekends either.
The flipside is that other company, the one where dedicated servers/colocation made perfect sense. The infrastructure is smaller needing only backup/restore, web server, load balancer, database server. The hosting company can easily handle most of the commodity issues, and our team is only really managing application deployment, so it works.