It sounds like you make a living doing stuff that has an incredibly small, ninja-like team, has a very low change rate, or is something that nobody really cares about. Things like RPO/RTO, multi-tenancy, logging, etc don't matter.

That's amazing. I wish I could do the same.

Unfortunately, I cannot run my business on a single server in a cage somewhere for a multitude of reasons. So I use AWS, a couple of colos and SaaS providers to deliver reliable services to my customers. Note I'm not a dogmatic AWS advocate, I seek out the best value -- I can't do what I do in AWS without alot of capital spend on firewalls and storage appliances, as well as the network infrastructure and people required to make those work.

Exactly. I don't quite understand how people say you just need a box. It certainly is much higher performant than a cloud VM, but that is not the only thing there is to run a software well. It all adds up bit by bit. It surely seems to be the way to go at some scale (or no customers who care).