In general I'm with you, but that here is the main benefit imho. I don't have the nerves to operate my own redundant, transparently growing and reliable storage system for my business. For use cases where privacy is important (like backups, private user data, etc), encrypting data before uploading limits the privacy leaks to metadata which might be acceptable.
AWS is impressive because they're running everyone's scalable reliable redundant storage server. It's not so scary when you just have to do it for your own small pond.
But you have to build the same level of redundancy and reliability for your small pond if you want to achieve S3's uptime. Scaling is the hardest part, but it's just one part of the puzzle.
In general I'm with you, but that here is the main benefit imho. I don't have the nerves to operate my own redundant, transparently growing and reliable storage system for my business. For use cases where privacy is important (like backups, private user data, etc), encrypting data before uploading limits the privacy leaks to metadata which might be acceptable.