This is great, how about adding reliability, availability, redundancy, SLA's and a few things more. How about needing to have a data warehouse, load balancers, SOC compliance? Not all the businesses go for the cheapest option and these decisions are rarely single dimensional. AWS is an integrated solutions for every aspects of an enterprise IT needs. If you try to compare a tiny slice of it with a single dimension comparison you can beat AWS but if you get the full picture it is getting harder to a point when you can't really beat it.
Availability over this year has been about 99.9% for the network, if I need more I can book a server in a different DC and do failovers. There is an SLA you can optionally book.
I don't require a data warehouse, load balancers (beyond HAProxy on the same host) or SOC Compliance at the moment, if I need those, I can build them.
Not all businesses go for the cheapest option but on the flipside if Amazon costs 80x of other providers, the business will probably just find two sysadmins and contract them for the work.
Even if you need bigger, load balancers are available as hardware, they're fairly cheap compared to AWS offerings and come with in-built firewall. Incoming traffic remains free on these. Your ISP will probably peer much cheaper than AWS and Hetzner if you're bringing enough money to justify it.
I know several corporations that do their entire IT out of AWS, some of them use inhouse and others scatter their usage across several cloud providers, AWS would likely increase their operating cost by 100x.
I guess you just downplay the amount of money you spend on developing your own solutions. What does a load balancer do on the same host anyway?
Where is this 80x-100x coming from? It would be impossible to create a 100 times cheaper solution because it would mean there is no margin left for the hosting provider.
Loadbalancers are useful for more than balancing load, you can distribute traffic to the different endpoints on them. They're fairly good at it.
80x is on traffic costs alone, I've detailed that above; 80$ for 1TB of traffic on AWS, not including incoming traffic costs, 1$ for 1TB of traffic on Hetzner, incoming traffic is free.
A 16core/64GB instance (m5.4xlarge) on AWS costs 360$ monthly, a tiny bit cheaper if you buy upfront. I pay 50$ a month for 16core/128GB/2TB. The 2TB storage would have to be paid extra on AWS. The m5a.4xlarge is a tad cheaper at 320$ monthly cost, again not counting for storage and bandwidth costs. I get double the RAM and lots of storage for less than 30% of the cost.
So on traffic, it's 80x cheaper, the instance is barely 30% the cost of AWS, and that's not counting the storage costs, which are very high on AWS compared to other providers (OVH, B2). And that only gets cheaper once you buy volume.
Of course the number 80-100x doesn't apply to me personally since I'm running a fairly low-scale operation but this all starts to stack up once you go large. A colo is even cheaper than any of these options since you only pay for power used and for hardware once.
To be fair, you should probably account for one or two mirror servers on hetzner for easier, lower latency fail over in case of hw failure (assuming you're talking about dedicated servers, not hetzner cloud). Of course with eg three servers, you might load balance acccross most of those during normal load, just make sure to have enough capacity left over to run with N less servers while you spin up a replacement and/or a disk is replaced etc).
Just for a more apples to apples comparison.
I guess the reason ppl don't "see" the insane premium clouds place on bandwidth is that bandwidth scales up with (presumably paying) customers. So as long as you're not streaming 4k video... You're happy to let the cloud eat out of the bit of your profits that "scales up".
We are heavily invested in AWS. AWS is not cheaper, but it doesn't mean it's prohibitively expensive when you consider everything it offers. What people tend to ignore are the other things it offers. For example, the parent talks about data transfer costs, but that's just one aspect of cost.
The real big cost in any organization is head count. And while a load balancer is not difficult to setup and maintain the first time, managing it becomes time consuming in a large enough organization. Couple that with everything else...
If someone can replicate what AWS is doing at a lower cost, people would move to them. But there are few companies out there that come close. Bandwidth cost is generally not your biggest expense.
