Before the cloud you bought a VM for $5 p/m. You installed apache, MySql, php or whatever and you ran your app.

It took half a day to setup. 1/2 hour if you'd done it a few times before.

If you were being fancy you bought two VMs, one for the webserver and one for SQL.

When you got bigger, you bought a bigger VM. Then dedicated servers. Then a web farm with load balancers.

For most companies, all the cloud did is get rid of the entirely minor hurdle of learning how to setup a server. Which these days in bigger companies the same guys who were the infra team are now just called the DevOps team and do exactly the same job, just inside AWS or Azure.

It's just quite a bit more convenient and easy to use a cloud than do the boring job of setting up your own server.

Every time you use a VM instead of some special cloud doodad thingy bell, you can get it much cheaper doing it yourself. But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install your dB engine.

It doesn't take long, it's just tedious and worth throwing a couple of hundred $$$ at a cloud to forget about it.

What it is not is anything expensive or complicated.

> But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install your dB engine

These are things you still need to think about and setup in the cloud as well. I wouldn't even say it's less work compared to just maintaining your own one or two servers. Except for the backups, that's the only solid convenience win for the cloud in my experience.