A year ago I created a personal Microsoft Azure account, and I installed one of my Magic apps on it. The cost for a small MySQL database server, a static webapp, and a small backend website ended up draining my bank account for roughly €200 per month (ugh!) - A year later I did the same exercise, except I created a VPS on DigitalOcean, and I more or less got the same for €10 per month. Don't get me wrong, Azure is kick ass cool, and contains tons of features your local VPS provider doesn't provide you with. However, with Magic I no longer saw the need for those extra features, simply because Magic has alternatives for all the most frequently missed items that Azure provides, and hence a VPS basically "becomes" a cloud and more, as I install Magic on it.
- Diagnostics or application insights - Check!
- Browsing and editing my server's file system - Check
- Audit logging and easily querying my log - Check
- User administration - Check
- Etc, etc, etc ...
This of course, is before all the things that Magic does which I cannot even imagine Azure ever being able to do - Such as the ability to automatically create secured HTTP REST CRUD endpoints wrapping my database, and scaffold an entire Angular frontend around my backend, producing some 50,000 lines of code in some 3-4 seconds. Or the ability to dynamically "install" modules on my server on the fly, securely, almost like dragging and dropping them into my server's file system. And all of this is now 100% Open Source and free of charge to use. In fact, you cannot even buy a license even if you tried. And my license choices also allows for anyone to create closed source applications using Magic (duh!)