Which VPS provider are you talking about specifically?
> Plus what is the point of scaling when you're losing money at any scale?
My point is that I'm not losing money. I'm saving money by transferring unpredictable salary costs into predictable server costs.
> I run a site with roughly 2 million monthly visitors. On AWS it would cost me $20,000/month on traffic alone.
If this is a static site, 2 million monthly visitors on AWS would cost less than $5.
If it's a non-static site and none of those 2 million visits are cached, I still can't begin to imagine what your app is doing that it could possibly cost you $20,000/month. That would buy you a huge fleet of servers (something like 200 mid-to-large EC2 instances).
It doesn't sound like you have a sense of what AWS costs, even within an order of magnitude.
> Instead I run it on 4 dedicated servers and a bunch of VPS, costing me around $500/month all-in-all.
Four medium EC2 instances also cost ~$500/month all-in, so you're seemingly saving nothing. The layers of software on top of the (virtual) hardware are free.
