I wonder what a managed or dedicated server would cost to perform the same calculations.
Sometime's it's still cheaper to have your own managed / self-managed gear... and from the looks of this pricing, even hire someone fulltime/freelancing to manage it all for you.
>"I wonder what a managed or dedicated server would cost to perform the same calculations."
It wouldn't cost you any money (unless you have metered electricity), but rather just opportunity cost of being able to do other work with your resources.
Unless you only need a short-term lease on the equipment, cloud servers will be more expensive that dedicated/colocated servers.
I have run my own servers in a datacenter for 7-8 years and going to a VM setup was the quantum leap. I can copy and paste a server in minutes and be up and running with a nearly identical setup that I have to setup for my dev environment anyways.
Hardening the server is something that can be outsourced for a lot less than thousands. Services like linode seem to be a nice middle ground. While I don't see myself going back to my own hardware in a rack i run in a datacenter, I do still see the benefit of knowing your stack a bit beyond coding. Knowing how the stack works helps when building software quite often.
Anyhow, those are just my experiences. VPS' with a very strong toolkit to take the edge off self-administering like Linode, etc, seem to be a very nice option. Heroku has caught my eye too but they have completely different measurements.
In my experience, all ways to 'avoid knowing what you're doing' are expensive.
It's all about time, and lack of it. If you can spend 1/10th of the time and still make a good profit, you could spend the other 9/10ths doing other profitable things.
At the end of the day, you're still going to need to A) learn what you're doing or B) hire someone who does know what they're doing - and given that one of the major selling points of these PaaS offerings is that you can get up and running without needing a dedicated sys admin, this seems particularly silly to me!
Sometime's it's still cheaper to have your own managed / self-managed gear... and from the looks of this pricing, even hire someone fulltime/freelancing to manage it all for you.