Seems like Americans live in some sort of other parallel reality Internet where Hetzner et al., don't exist.
I could do all that for a fraction of the cost with dedicated servers outside of EC2.
I don't know where this guy worked but I've seen at least 10 cloud migrations in my career, across different clients. It's not that uncommon and not too expensive unless you're relying on weird services on top of your cloud.
Not sure why the '/s'. Options exist, and not just "AWS or GCP".
In practical terms, the hassle of managing the hardware is far greater than having to manage software, especially now that everyone is on the container boat. Not that it was necessarily different for people on bsd + jails in the past, but that wasn't widespread.
I think dedicated server are a sweet spot of complexity / cost.
AWS $16,000M revenue Q3 Azure $9,000M est revenue Q3 GCP $4,500M revenue Q3 OVH $181M revenue Q3 (~46M "cloud") Cloudflare $172M Q3 Hetzner $277M est revenue (2019 year)
A lot of customers find smaller providers very valuable. But the reason you see so many mentions of AWS/Azure/GCP is simply a reflection that yes, the bulk of hosted services in the world are based on those three. Yes the HN crowd might like the approach or thought of the smaller service providers, but they are much much smaller.
AWS solves mostly an accounting, not a tech problem.