When I looked at how expensive a rented dedicated server was compared to AWS I expected a big difference, but I was still suprised how cheap you can get dedicated servers today. Not worrying about actually owning the hardware is nice, and you still get vastly more hardware for the same price as in the cloud.
There are many advantages to AWS and similar services, but if you can't really take advantage of all the goodies because e.g. you also need to provide a local version of your software (which is the case for Gitlab, as far as I understand), renting dedicated servers is an order of magnitude cheaper.
There are many advantages to AWS and similar services, but if you can't really take advantage of all the goodies because e.g. you also need to provide a local version of your software (which is the case for Gitlab, as far as I understand), renting dedicated servers is an order of magnitude cheaper.