My guess is rather that the whole chip shortage thing was more related to the NFT hype that made people buy up graphics cards like a motherfucker, because:
1. We didn't have a chip shortage over here, at least not from what I could see in neither physical nor online stores.
2. There was a sudden abundance of chips as soon as NFTs were considered no longer popular.

As for maintaining a server for a storefront, it doesn't require much, you can host one on a low spec server pretty easily even.
If anything, AWS would be the more expensive option, due to their billing scheme (I haven't worked with it as much to know for sure, but I know I've been pointing and laughing a lot at people who fell for the AWS meme, only to then get impossibly high invoices to pay, and then they cope whenever I say "I told you so!").