For company hosting cloud solutions gets you the various compliance stuff for free which can be worth it if you're not too large, and of course faster turnaround if you need to get a product out.

For personal a cheap vps will end up costing around the same as something you can do on your own, without the risk of messing up your machine/network from a vulnerable endpont

This is really it: compliance. The cost is in having to prove that you did the right things. But I do wonder if we will see an easier path forward with that. After all if there was a way to pay someone a once a year fee for an audit and filling out the paperwork and the cost was lower than the cost of using AWS then surely people would do that and it is an opportunity for an audit business that is willing to work with self-hosted setups. Or just have GPT-5 fill out the compliance docs. I suspect it won’t be long until GPT-5 is reading them.

For free, and 50% or more of your cloud spend.

I'll admit, bit of a poor choice of word,l. But when you need to do e.g. physical security, costs add up quickly over what you'd spend on cloud in say a year, and the compliance companies are usually a huge headache to deal with so that'll be some nice amount of your staff's time lost

I think AI coding is another part of why this is seeing a resurgence. It’s a lot quicker to build quick and dirty scripts or debug the random issues that come up self hosting.

You’re misunderstanding the value of cloud computing, which should be obvious at this point. But I’ll go ahead and re-explain it for you.

Businesses need to maintain focus and allocate resources toward delivering their core product.

Software is highly profitable and even with inflated cloud computing costs, it makes some level of sense to not over-optimize and spread teams thin reinventing the wheel.

If I can deliver my product or feature to the market 20% faster that’s going to make more money than if I optimize my cloud infrastructure costs to save 50%.

As a business owner I don’t want to have to hire high-paid specialists who understand the deep intricacies of data center infrastructure, I want to be able to pay people with highly common skills who can quickly translate my business logic to working software.

A lot of this is support. If you’re self hosting, when things don’t work the way they should, the team has no one to blame. On AWS, they can always lean on aws not working the way it should as an excuse.