AWS/Azure/etc. are just not the place to get up a low cost personal server. I think the free tier confuses people into trying it, but ultimately what you get is

AWS/Azure/etc. are just not the place to get up a low cost personal server. I think the free tier confuses people into trying it, but ultimately what you get is a tiny VM with limited services that is designed for you to rapidly outgrow. That's okay though, because that's not why the big clouds are valuable. I'm going to refer specifically to AWS, but I also include Azure, GCP, etc. AWS is not cheap. If you only need a single host, or a small fixed group of hosts, AWS is an expensive option with little to justify the added cost. What you're paying for with AWS isn't just the resources you use, but the resources AWS keeps available for use at a moment's notice. If you don't have that need to scale your resources up and down, the costs of using AWS become harder to justify. If the goal is to do it on the cheap, a $5/mo vps is going to do better than the AWS free tier. If you need more power, the price gap between a bare metal private server and an equivalent AWS instance just gets bigger as the server gets more powerful.