> It's absolutely worth the money when you look at the whole picture.
That highly depends on many things. If you run a business with a relatively steady load that doesn't need to scale quickly multiple times per day, AWS is definitely not for you. Take Let's Encrypt[1] as an example. Just because cloud is the hype doesn't mean it's always worth it.
Edit: Or a personal experience: I had a customer that insisted on building their website on AWS. They weren't expecting high traffic loads and didn't need high availability, so I suggested to just use a VPS for $50 a month. They wanted to go the AWS route. Now their website is super scalable with all the cool buzzwords and it costs them $400 a month to run. Great! And in addition, the whole setup is way more complex to maintain since it's built on AWS instead of just a simple website with a database and some cache.
That highly depends on many things. If you run a business with a relatively steady load that doesn't need to scale quickly multiple times per day, AWS is definitely not for you. Take Let's Encrypt[1] as an example. Just because cloud is the hype doesn't mean it's always worth it.
Edit: Or a personal experience: I had a customer that insisted on building their website on AWS. They weren't expecting high traffic loads and didn't need high availability, so I suggested to just use a VPS for $50 a month. They wanted to go the AWS route. Now their website is super scalable with all the cool buzzwords and it costs them $400 a month to run. Great! And in addition, the whole setup is way more complex to maintain since it's built on AWS instead of just a simple website with a database and some cache.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37536103