This is my biggest pet peeve, and I think a lot of it (among supposedly tech-savvy people at least, less technical people are a different story) is caused by people looking at the cost of a random selection of AWS products, often quoting on-demand prices rather than the 40% discount you can get by buying a year of reserved capacity at once, multiplying by 12, and then freaking out.
Many cloud products are not good deals, and almost seem designed to make people think running a web service is inaccessible to them. Those products are usually given a healthy markup because you’re paying to avoid certain setup steps or for the ability to scale infinitely large in two clicks.
You can still just rent a few cheap servers (or even just one) and, if you set them up properly, you can run a decently sized website off of them no problem.