Whew....I'm glad it's still working although I have not tried it as yet. I always hold my breath whenever an "operating system" is taken down, played with, and returned to service. It's always nice when a plan comes together!
I'm aware, as I'm an AWS certified architect and I've done Linux engineering for 20+ years. There are other things we are doing as well.
However, it works. I really like LOTW and appreciated when people use it. Paper is pretty awesome too sometimes.
Best I can tell, they host their own servers in-house, likely on the fiber that already comes into their building, and that they pay for anyway for internet access. Going to the cloud (or any datacenter) would be an absolutely ridiculous move as far as cost is concerned. But I'm sure all the linux engineers already realized that.
Hard to conclude without any internal knowedge. It sounds like Ria is on the right path. A network link is only one of many factors at play in any move. Speaking from experience, the ability to scale up in a matter of minutes to hours or the ability to pause compute resources when not needed or not having to monitor hardware is advantageous. And some technologies you cannot host on-prem.
