ajpauwels

Well it's because AWS is a production-ready service with guaranteed uptime, automatic scalability, and a 24/7 team of engineers making sure those GBs are making it to their destination in the exact way they're designed to every minute of every day. How could you possibly compare your 100Mbps home line servicing a handful of users with an enterprise connection able to handle millions? Furthermore, unless you have a business contract with your ISP, it's very likely against your ToS to host a publicly-available web service, and your IP is likely dynamic so you'll need to automate the update of your DNS entry if your public IP changes, and that will still only partially work due to TTL.

But regardless of that, I'm willing to accept that home-hosting a handful of hard drives on a server can handle things initially until you hit your scaling wall, this doesn't answer the question of how you plan to finance four figures per month of hardware costs, and more if your amount of users and data begin to scale?

Also, actually hold-up, FOUR FIGURES per month hosting at home on a 100mbps line with (looking at your past comments) 2TB-3TB of hosting? That is INSANELY high. I'm paying ~$1500 per month to AWS to host production-ready, massively auto-scaling kubernetes clusters, and together they host not only the entire companies software, but all of our CI/CD, identity management, observability, and secret management. That's ~9 x-large spot instances + control plane + container registries + DNS. How is an API and some storage at home costing you 4 figures PER MONTH??

Yea that's on me I assumed because you mentioned the cost of a 100Mbps home line. I assume you're in a co-lo like Hetzner then?

Also, accusing people who work in the infrastructure industry of being trolls for bringing up very valid, realistic issues as to your technological scaling strategy is not the greatest look. These are problems that are actively being solved with realistic solutions on a daily basis. You didn't magically discover that AWS is expensive and everyone simply hasn't realized that co-lo is cheaper. AWS is expensive because scaling is hard. Companies DO switch back to on-prem instead of cloud, but they typically only do that after having achieved massive scale where hiring and operating a full-time operations teams is actually cheaper than paying AWS to do it.

If you do succeed, which I sincerely hope you do, and things begin to scale, you're going to start hitting these problems. You're going to have to solve those problems. You're going to come up with technologies and tactics that solve those problems in your co-lo. You're going to spend money and time figuring those solutions out. At the end of it, you'll realize that those technologies and tactics that you developed were already developed, optimized, and ready-to-go inside a cloud provider like AWS, and your total cost-of-ownership, meaning the lost time, money, and opportunities you spent developing an inferior at-home solution, will far exceed the money you saved paying for a co-lo instead of clicking four-buttons to have a handful of EC2 spot instances on an auto-scaling group and an S3 bucket.

I think the key word there is "personal project or service". You're absolutely correct that running a Hetzner VM or even a decently-sized at-home server to host some personal projects you and a couple other people will access is cheaper and most likely the way to go.

AWS doesn't target that use though, it targets companies looking to build production-ready, client-facing, auto-scaling infrastructure that's available every minute of every day and secured by AWS engineers' expertise.