It's funny to me that Amazon has looped all the way back around to this, while a bunch of smaller providers who've been doing this for over a decade have been trying to catch up with AWS on all the other fronts. But, realistically, for a lot of users, AWS is a stupidly complex beast just to get a website up and running. I've written a bunch of code that interacts with AWS APIs in two languages, and I still require a couple of hours to spin up anything new there.
But, as others note, the variable cost factor seems to still be a sticking point. I can setup a Digital Ocean droplet, or Linode, or one of a dozen other low-cost VPS providers, for $5 or $10 a month, and I know it will never cost more than that. Maybe I'll bump into memory, disk, or bandwidth limits...but, AWS is a killer if you aren't careful. I used to maintain (and pay for, out of pocket) a non-profit's website on AWS, and the price ballooned while I wasn't paying attention, due to automated backups to S3 and some other stuff, and by the time I noticed was costing me $183/month, for a website that could easily run on a cheap VPS. My fault for not paying closer attention, not setting up cost alerts, etc., but I moved the site off of AWS and onto one of my own web servers, where it literally costs me single digit dollars to run (it has many GBs of email but otherwise is a small site with very low traffic).
So...unless they're giving me some reason to think I won't end up with a massive bill one month because of a popular post, or something, I probably still won't think "I know, I'll use AWS!", unless it's a situation where I need the scaling capabilities of AWS.
But, as others note, the variable cost factor seems to still be a sticking point. I can setup a Digital Ocean droplet, or Linode, or one of a dozen other low-cost VPS providers, for $5 or $10 a month, and I know it will never cost more than that. Maybe I'll bump into memory, disk, or bandwidth limits...but, AWS is a killer if you aren't careful. I used to maintain (and pay for, out of pocket) a non-profit's website on AWS, and the price ballooned while I wasn't paying attention, due to automated backups to S3 and some other stuff, and by the time I noticed was costing me $183/month, for a website that could easily run on a cheap VPS. My fault for not paying closer attention, not setting up cost alerts, etc., but I moved the site off of AWS and onto one of my own web servers, where it literally costs me single digit dollars to run (it has many GBs of email but otherwise is a small site with very low traffic).
So...unless they're giving me some reason to think I won't end up with a massive bill one month because of a popular post, or something, I probably still won't think "I know, I'll use AWS!", unless it's a situation where I need the scaling capabilities of AWS.