I agree that AWS EC2 is probably too expensive on the whole. It also doesn't really provide any of the greater benefits of the cloud that come from "someone else's server".

However, to the point of microservices as the article mentions, you probably should look at lambda (or fargate, or a mix) unless you can really saturate the capacity of multiple servers.

When we swapped to ECS+EC2 running microservices over to lambda our costs dropped sharply. Even serving millions of requests a day we spend a lot of time in between idle, especially spread across the services.

Additionally, we have 0 outages now from hardware in the last 5 years. As an engineer, this has made my QoL significantly better.

> I agree that AWS EC2 is probably too expensive on the whole.

Probably? It's about 5-10X more expensive than equivalent services from Hetzner.