Comment by throwaway106382

Basically it boils down to:

Is your time worth more than what the fully managed services on AWS cost? And I mean that quite literally in the sense of your billable hours.

If you like spending time tinkering with manually configuring linux servers, and don't have anything else that generates better value for you to do - by all means go for it.

For small pet projects with no customers, a cheap Hetzner box is probably fine. For serious projects with customers that expect you to be able to get back on your feet quickly when shit hits the fan, or teams of developers that lose hours of productivity when a sandbox environment goes down, maybe not so much.

Is AWS more expensive than the salary of the infra guy you would need to hire to do all this stuff by hand? Probably not.