> You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks

I think it is a lot safer for backups to be with an entirely different provider. It protects you in case of account compromise, account closure, disputes.

If using cloud and you want to be safe, you should be multi-cloud. People have been saved from disaster by multi-cloud setups.

> You're not paying up-front costs (vs. investing hundreds of dollars for buying server hardware)

Not true for VPSes or rented dedicated servers either.

> Peak-heavy loads can be a lot cheaper.

they have to be very spiky indeed though. LLMs might fit but a lot of compute heavy spiky loads do not. I saved a client money on video transcoding that only happened once per upload and only over a month or two an year by renting a dedi all ear round rather than using the AWS transcoding service.

> Compared to the rack hosting setup described in the post. Hetzner, Linode, etc. do provide multiple AZs with dedicated servers.

You have to do work to ensure things run across multiple availability zones (and preferably regions) anyway.

> But an RDS instance with solid backups-equivalent will usually not amortize quickly, if you need to pay someone to set it up.

You have more forced upgrades.

An unmanaged database will only need a lot of work if operating at large scale. If you are then its probably well worth employing a DBA anyway as an AWS or similar managed DB is not going to do all the optimising and tuning a DBA will do.