> Well, you still have to patch and secure your OS on EC2. As far as EC2, AWS is really just taking over the hardware portion and making it somewhat easier to scale. But rapidly scaling is not something most apps do, even big ones.
You're stuck on this theme that AWS is somehow akin to scaling. That's one benefit of AWS but it's not the only one. At small scale the margins on AWS are peanuts. A t4g micro is $6.15 / mo. The equivalent on Digital Ocean is $5 / mo. Buying your own Raspberry Pi 4 would be ~ $70 with an enclosure/peripherals, so you'd break even at ... 14 months of running your t4g. This isn't counting the power used (which would probably be minimal on a Raspberry Pi.) That overhead is nothing.
> As far as your host OS goes get a production ready image to run your production ready container images. It's a one time thing. Keeping the OS updated? This is not brain surgery every time there is an update. Plus you can configure it to automatically install security updates.
There's more to it than that. You're just thinking about running software not how packets get from a user's machine to your running software. Most residential connections don't come with a stable/static IPv4. You can update a DNS entry with your changing IP, but then you're down for however long it takes you to change your A record and however long your domain's TTLs to expire. If you pay for a static IPv4 then you've already paid for more than what you're getting from a cloud VPS. Then there's the fact that residential ISPs block tons of ports, have no SLAs on uptime, can drop your traffic without warning or recourse, etc etc.
If you're running a tiny, mostly-static site with minimal uptime requirements then you'll pay less and spend much less effort using a shared webhosting platform. They'll do all the ops for you and you get charged peanuts since these providers usually colo their own machines and run hundreds of sites on them. Dreamhost can serve a Wordpress site for $1.99 / mo with no ops work required. That pays for 35 months of running a Raspberry Pi.
A Raspberry pi is $35, for the latest model, and you definitely do not need an enclosure. You do need a power adapter, which may be around $10. But also, an older Raspberry pi can be even cheaper!
I'm not advocating for people hosting sites on a Raspberry pi in their homes, but it's certainly easy to do and if your operation is small enough and you have an extra computer lying around the cost is actually near $0.
Pretty much every ISP I've used in the US has had mostly static IPs. They usually didn't change unless the modem got rebooted. This is good enough for your minecraft server or unimportant personal website.
But of course if your residential internet is no longer serving your hosting needs, you can go a step up and get a virtual host or colocate your old computer! Yes colocation will cost a lot more than a virtual host on a PHP shared host, but you also get more computing bang for your buck.
You're stuck on this theme that AWS is somehow akin to scaling. That's one benefit of AWS but it's not the only one. At small scale the margins on AWS are peanuts. A t4g micro is $6.15 / mo. The equivalent on Digital Ocean is $5 / mo. Buying your own Raspberry Pi 4 would be ~ $70 with an enclosure/peripherals, so you'd break even at ... 14 months of running your t4g. This isn't counting the power used (which would probably be minimal on a Raspberry Pi.) That overhead is nothing.
> As far as your host OS goes get a production ready image to run your production ready container images. It's a one time thing. Keeping the OS updated? This is not brain surgery every time there is an update. Plus you can configure it to automatically install security updates.
There's more to it than that. You're just thinking about running software not how packets get from a user's machine to your running software. Most residential connections don't come with a stable/static IPv4. You can update a DNS entry with your changing IP, but then you're down for however long it takes you to change your A record and however long your domain's TTLs to expire. If you pay for a static IPv4 then you've already paid for more than what you're getting from a cloud VPS. Then there's the fact that residential ISPs block tons of ports, have no SLAs on uptime, can drop your traffic without warning or recourse, etc etc.
If you're running a tiny, mostly-static site with minimal uptime requirements then you'll pay less and spend much less effort using a shared webhosting platform. They'll do all the ops for you and you get charged peanuts since these providers usually colo their own machines and run hundreds of sites on them. Dreamhost can serve a Wordpress site for $1.99 / mo with no ops work required. That pays for 35 months of running a Raspberry Pi.