An m4.2xlarge on AWS EC2 provides 8 cores and 32 gig of RAM for 40 cents/hour. That'd be $288/month. You could also get an m4.xlarge with 4 cores and 16 gig for $144/month.
Of course, that doesn't include storage and bandwidth.
I mean, sure. I've got a 5 year old laptop that will outperform the t2.micro I'm pay $8.35/month for. But I don't trust my home internet to be stable or fast enough. Not to mention that my primary usage is an IRC bouncer, so I need it to not be on my home internet connection so some script kiddie doesn't DDoS me after I ban them from a channel because they were spamming racial slurs. Yes, that has actually happened.
In the US you can't really get a reliable network connection to your residence. The entire shift towards the cloud is in no small part due to crappy internet. The large ISPs really missed the boat on this.
I average probably a single 5 minute hiccup each month. That's 99.988% uptime. For someone wanting to run their WoW guild's voice chat server, or just a toy server, or a development/staging environment, that's plenty.
But I mean, my home internet is only 35 mbps anyways via Frontier FIOS. I can get 150 mbps through Comcast, but I refuse to give that company a penny of my money. In either case, I'm not going to be running any major production servers at home anyways.
I have Time Warner, and experience about 10-15 minutes of downtime a week on my home wifi and once a year it'll go down for an entire evening. That's annoying, but fine for home wifi and maybe a hobby website, but you couldn't run a company like that.
This is not at all true for me at least. I get very reliable internet, both at home and at my office. At my office I have static IPs and am allowed to host stuff..
Now I would not host my main customer site there. But dev servers? Beta servers? QA servers? Hey why not.. save some massive bills.
Exactly... you won't host a main customer site at home. If ISPs were smarter, they would make this easier for you and provide the tools to make it extremely easy. ISPs could have been AWS or Azure, instead they preferred to be a flaky bundle of wires.
