I think in this case I could have interchanged &quot;terrible&quot; with &quot;enterprise&quot; and it would&#x27;ve had a more &quot;&quot;correct&quot;&quot; meaning (seriously I wish I could keep adding quotes to all of that...).  I had to fight and argue with the previous host (Rackspace) to get them to lower our prices.  It also took weeks to deploy a server.  Now it takes 5-25 seconds with a prebuilt AMI that I&#x27;ve cooked together, deployed on exactly the hardware that I want, with the network configuration that I setup, and the security rules (bi-directional!  Rackspace firewall only offers inbound at the level we had) that I want&#x2F;need.  On top of this, to get lower prices, I open a ticket and say &quot;Hello, I&#x27;ll be needing this server for 1 year, lower prices please.&quot;  No phone calls involved.  I&#x27;m not trying to diss Rackspace, they seem to be doing a lot of cool things...  I simply had a permanantly sour taste left in my mouth.  AWS is a big juicy BBQ sandwich in comparison.<p>On your points about AWS itself I&#x27;m not going to argue with as they certainly are valid, however in my specific setup (everything production is c4&#x2F;r3 types, 1tb gp2 volumes as all volumes, and running network benchmarks to ensure everything is properly sized) I&#x27;ve actually had a pretty big performance <i>gain</i> over dedicated servers in a DMZ behind a hardware firewall.<p>With regards to the bandwidth, it seems a common issue is when you have very chatty services (Apache Kafka) deployed across multiple AZ&#x27;s the bill gets real big real fast.  Thus far, we&#x27;re not even cracking 3-digits in bandwidth monthly.  Maybe we&#x27;re simply not at a scale to notice these problems yet.