ever since I learnt self-hosting, it feels so liberating
replies(6):
+1
Last year I went to self-hosting and I felt the same. I paid less than USD 2000 for a small laptop that I use as a server plus a home NAS and by my current utilization I got in 3 months the return plus the ownership and flexibility.
Using AWS for smaller personal projects will always be more expensive and probably less fun.
On the other hand I recently had to run an ML model over hundreds of thousands of media files. I used AWS to launch 100s of GPUs using spot instances and complete the job in a few hours, then just turned it all off and moved on. It cost a few hundred dollars total.
In my mind it's at this kind of scale AWS really makes sense.
I've deployed multiple Lambda for many years and I have yet to pay anything for them given how _generous_ their free tier is.
Nowadays I must be at around ~100 Lambda executions per day and my billing for Lambda is still $0/month.
To achieve something similar with self-hosting it would require me to have a server running 24/7 just to allow my code running when needed.
So, almost as with everything else in tech (and life in general), the idea is to not see AWS or self-hosting as the best tools for everything. Sometimes AWS is better, sometimes self-hosting is.
Having the freedom to pick the best one in each situation is quite nice!