actually renting servers is cheap.
however renting a stable network isn't.
when you rent servers you either need a overlay network via a VPN or you end up renting a rack (1/3, half, full) and connect it yourself. but as you might guess you are now inside a single datacenter, if it burns or somehow looses it's connection you are offline. that's not a big deal for some sites, but some stuff will suffer from that.
AWS and Clouds are more about networks and traffic spikes than just a bunch of servers. It's also easier to just replace the system in a outage than on most other services where you mostly try to heal it up. On Clouds you just trash it.
We have some small sites on 3 AWS Small instances and a AWS RDS Master-Slave. Whenever one instance breaks or AWS makes a notice that this instance will be recycled we just reprovision it. We are also on AWS Frankfurt which didn't have a real outage yet. Google pricing would be in favor but no RDS Postgres yet, same for Azure (even when we get 130 € per month on 7 accounts for free (startup program) for 3 years or so).
however our software is sold to customers as hardware and not designed to run on a cloud (yet), mostly because of sensitive data.
when you rent servers you either need a overlay network via a VPN or you end up renting a rack (1/3, half, full) and connect it yourself. but as you might guess you are now inside a single datacenter, if it burns or somehow looses it's connection you are offline. that's not a big deal for some sites, but some stuff will suffer from that.
AWS and Clouds are more about networks and traffic spikes than just a bunch of servers. It's also easier to just replace the system in a outage than on most other services where you mostly try to heal it up. On Clouds you just trash it. We have some small sites on 3 AWS Small instances and a AWS RDS Master-Slave. Whenever one instance breaks or AWS makes a notice that this instance will be recycled we just reprovision it. We are also on AWS Frankfurt which didn't have a real outage yet. Google pricing would be in favor but no RDS Postgres yet, same for Azure (even when we get 130 € per month on 7 accounts for free (startup program) for 3 years or so).
however our software is sold to customers as hardware and not designed to run on a cloud (yet), mostly because of sensitive data.