Yeah, this seems absurdly too high. My guess is he was hosting it on AWS or one of the other premium cloud providers. Places like Digital Ocean are a fraction of AWS’ cost.

I remember doing a pricing analysis at work, and every three months of AWS time would buy us a completely new server rack. Just three months! AWS was out at that point, leaving colocating, keeping it in-house, or services like Digital Ocean as the remaining reasonable options.