As usual, it depends. I know some friends that have profitable websites because they run on a private server and they handcrafted everything. If they had to use cloud services for serving stuff, host the db, provide search and cache things, it would cost too much and they couldn't make a living out of it.
To me, this shows that the actual service/content they're providing has relatively low value, and so they're "making" money not just on the content but also on the services side; eg, they're a cheaper sysadmin than an outsourced one. And they're also possibly ignoring risk; eg, they don't have the data durability that a cloud provider does, but it Probably Won't Matter (TM).
There's absolutely nothing wrong with this way of making money; the lower the margins, the more watching your costs is crucially important, and the difference between making a living and not even breaking even!
Possibly, it may also be that the cloud providers are offering things they don't need. Maybe that's uptime guarantees, potential scalability or integration with other services.
If you take SaaS, they are skewed towards buy, because their margin is ridiculously high. Better to hit the market now by using stable products than optimizing on spend.
The bigger you are and the more you can think about optimizing spend.
I think it is quite the opposite. Having worked in startups that were VC funded it seems they consider VC money free money and just spend a lot of it in infrastructure without the need to.
I know for a fact our bill was around 15-20k USD per month for running a webapp that could be ran in digital ocean 40 dollars/month.
For a lifestyle business without VC money to burn it makes all the difference.
Oh I've definitely seen that too. My example requires responsible (and smart) leadership. My thought is that optimizing costs engineering hours, which are much more expensive than paying for the service bills.
