> Have you compared your cost with the cost of running your own cloud on top of dedicated servers from a traditional provider?
For me, using EC2 and other Amazon web services isn't just, or even mostly, about cost. It's also about ease of use, flexibility, reliability and scalability, where AWS wins hands down compared to attempting to replicate the same myself using dedicated servers.
AWS are not primarily in the business of renting servers, they're in the business of selling their operational expertise in building and managing reliable, massively scalable distributed systems, and doing that well is very, very hard.
For me, using EC2 and other Amazon web services isn't just, or even mostly, about cost. It's also about ease of use, flexibility, reliability and scalability, where AWS wins hands down compared to attempting to replicate the same myself using dedicated servers.
AWS are not primarily in the business of renting servers, they're in the business of selling their operational expertise in building and managing reliable, massively scalable distributed systems, and doing that well is very, very hard.