Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]
I thought I'd answer some of your questions, as the person that pays the bill.<p>1. This can be cheaper on AWS. We've been meaning to move to reserve instances, paying a year at a time, for a while and simply haven't done it yet.<p>2. Fastly has already donate CDN usage to us, but we haven't fully utilized it yet as we're (slowly) sort out some issues between primary gem serving and the bundler APIs.<p>3. RubyCentral pays the bill and can afford to do so via the proceeds generated from RubyConf and RailsConf.<p>4. The administration is an all volunteer (myself included) effort. Because of that, paying a premium to use AWS has it's advantages because it allows more volunteers have help out given the well traveled platform. In the past, RubyGems was hosted on dedicated hardware within Rackspace. While this was certainly cheaper, it created administrative issues. Granted those can be solved without using AWS, but we get back to again desiring to have as low of friction on the administration as possible.<p>Any other questions?