I'm always flabbergasted when I see what people pay and how much effort they need to invest to keep their cloud websites from eating them alive.

My allegedly more complicated VPS stack needs an afternoon of attention every two years when a new Debian major release is necessary, and costs have been predictable for 15 years, no matter what happened traffic wise.

The predictability of costs is underrated too. You don't want your hosting solution to automatically scale up to $20,000. You want that if it's overloaded it's simply overloaded.