[Nathan2055]

> The best example I have is the massive infrastructure many people insist is required for a website.

This is my biggest pet peeve, and I think a lot of it (among supposedly tech-savvy people at least, less technical people are a different story) is caused by people looking at the cost of a random selection of AWS products, often quoting on-demand prices rather than the 40% discount you can get by buying a year of reserved capacity at once, multiplying by 12, and then freaking out.

Many cloud products are not good deals, and almost seem designed to make people think running a web service is inaccessible to them. Those products are usually given a healthy markup because you’re paying to avoid certain setup steps or for the ability to scale infinitely large in two clicks.

You can still just rent a few cheap servers (or even just one) and, if you set them up properly, you can run a decently sized website off of them no problem.

[kitsunesoba]

I think what scares a lot of people is the prospect of maintaining a server, configuring it to be secure and keeping it up to speed with security updates. With a cloud product, the only concern becomes keeping your project's dependencies updated which is less intimidating.

It's something that's on my mind when I think about launching a site that's intended to draw a significant userbase. Back in the day I'd set up VPS instances with nginx+unicorn+rails and it was relatively smooth, but security has seemingly become so much more critical that I don't know I'd trust myself to get all the biggest holes patched up and more importantly, keep them patched.

[pjc50]

Yes. It's the "servers should be cattle not pets" philosophy; then you realize that having one server necessarily makes it a "pet" that demands periodic care and feeding with occasional emergencies that cost money or wake you up at night.

Also: people use big services for discovery. If you write a blog, nobody's going to read it unless you get out there on the social media and promote it.

[acedTrex]

Agreed, a 3 year reserved small ec2 is a few bucks a month. It can run multiple small websites fine. Hosting has never been more accessible, people just get scared by the concept.