What has gone up in cost? The methods available 20 years ago are still available now.
We just have additional options now, which are actually cheaper to start, as you can get a lot of usage out of AWS' free tier.
Sure, once you get to "scale up" it's probably cheaper to do everything on-prem still, but that story is much better too with things like Golang, Docker, Elixir, k8s, etc, etc to make managing/building web-scale infrastructure much easier.
There were 1 billion people on the internet in 2005. Now there are more than 5 billion people on the internet.
There were no smartphones in 2005 and everyone used the web to access "social media". Now any social media is nonviable unless it has an app for both of the smartphone platforms.
Youtube and streaming video didn't exist in 2005. Now it's table stakes for social media to allow people to share videos.
The bar has been raised by at least an order of magnitude. Sure, it might be easier and/or cheaper now to do what Facebook did...in 2005. But that won't get you anywhere in 2023.
We just have additional options now, which are actually cheaper to start, as you can get a lot of usage out of AWS' free tier.
Sure, once you get to "scale up" it's probably cheaper to do everything on-prem still, but that story is much better too with things like Golang, Docker, Elixir, k8s, etc, etc to make managing/building web-scale infrastructure much easier.