If you rent a dedicated server from AWS, you will be hit for various additional fees which will likely dwarf that $40/month.
So the issue here is not really shared vs dedicated instances. The issue here is that a particular cloud provider (namely AWS) has set up an opaque fee structure.
In my experience, when people say "dedicated server" they typically mean something like OVH rather than a real "cloud" provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.). In other words, something morally equivalent to colo but without having to ship servers around.
Yes, that is likely the case here as well. But if someone is not well versed in cloud providers and reads these comments, they might be misinformed without clarifying that this issue is AWS vs other providers, as opposed to dedicated vs shared resources.
Data Gravity. If you already have all your data in AWS, and your app that is generating new data is in AWS, it makes a lot of sense to get bare metal in AWS to do batch workloads on that data, so there is no egress fees.
We did a calculation in my previous company and it turned out even with the egregious egress costs it was way cheaper to host these huge workloads outside of AWS.
Anyone who has experience with AWS or is looking to hire candidates with known skills. AWS is the industry standard. A lot of quality candidates know it and use it, because it pays the best and has the most job opportunities. And most companies use it because they were first to market and its easy to find candidates.
I'd argue that startups should have a good reason for not using AWS. The costs for their basic services is not that much compared to the cost of development.
I suspect they're not getting a dedicated server from Amazon. Anyone doing that is either foolish or is so locked into AWS infrastructure that it cost-wise makes more sense than to expand a network to another provider. Fun times, indeed.
What I started doing is just running my own "cloud" out of my house for personal projects. I have all of the things I need. There's some overhead in terms of maintenance and up-front setup cost in terms of time and equipment, but after that it's pretty smooth sailing.
> I suspect they're not getting a dedicated server from Amazon.
If it's literally called a dedicated server, why would you suspect otherwise?
Source: I worked in the core EC2 dataplane for a couple years. PEs and leadership there would not be happy with misleading customers. We constantly thought of the customer experience there.
Generally you get a "dedicated host" from AWS, not a "dedicated server" so that was kind of my first tip off. There's a very big difference; the only usecase I'd really consider for dedicated hosts is security related and, frankly, they're far more expensive than any colo box. Dedicated Hosts are also far more restrictive than what you get at a colo DC. Second, even if AWS offered to let you have full control of a rack box you'd have to be economically out of your mind with AWS' network costs compared to a colo DC.
You still have network performance limitations + the security aspects to run by yourself (as in: not getting your data drive encrypted by a ransomware)
I probably wasn't explicit enough with "cloud" but I mean running your own isolated workloads with at minimum virtual machines and virtual isolated storage (block or otherwise). From a topological perspective my home DC resembles most major clouds other than the fact that there are not two sites.
So the issue here is not really shared vs dedicated instances. The issue here is that a particular cloud provider (namely AWS) has set up an opaque fee structure.