The first approach will be significantly cheaper if using the cloud.
It allows you to use spot/ephemeral instances and scale down capacity to almost zero cost without any loss in availability.
Single server in the cloud is great for dev environments and if you don't care about uptime. But given that poor uptime is toxic for customer retention only incompetent businesses would deliberately not choose to use something better suited. Especially when it's so much cheaper.
> The first approach will be significantly cheaper if using the cloud.
Only if you're regularly scaling down to zero (AKA too few paying customers to stay in business).
> only incompetent businesses would deliberately not choose to use something better suited.
There's a time and place for both approaches. If you're serving anywhere near the number of users needed to show a profit, spot instances are extremely expensive.
It allows you to use spot/ephemeral instances and scale down capacity to almost zero cost without any loss in availability.
Single server in the cloud is great for dev environments and if you don't care about uptime. But given that poor uptime is toxic for customer retention only incompetent businesses would deliberately not choose to use something better suited. Especially when it's so much cheaper.