The &quot;alternatives&quot; depend on your situation.<p>Picture a continuum between brain-dead simple websites and business-critical complex websites:<p><pre><code>  simple:  static website, WordPress blog
  moderate:  small business CMS, etc
  complex:  Netflix, AirBNB
</code></pre>
If you&#x27;re running a simple WordPress blog, the AWS prices are absurdly overkill.  For this use-case, there are a zillion alternatives.  Linode, Digital Ocean, Rackspace bare metal, etc, etc.<p>On the other end of the spectrum, you want to run a high-availability website with failover across multiple regions like Netflix.  You need the value-added &quot;services&quot; of a comprehensive cloud provider (the &quot;<i>I</i>&quot; and &quot;<i>S</i>&quot; in &quot;<i>IaaS</i>&quot; as in &quot;<i>Infrastructure Services</i>&quot;). For that scenario, there are currently 4 big competitors:  AWS, MS Azure, Google Compute Cloud, and IBM SoftLayer.  However, many observers see that Google and IBM are not keeping pace with AWS and Azure on features so at the moment, it&#x27;s more of a 2 horse race than a 4.<p>Keep in mind that the vast majority of cost comparisons showing AWS to be overpriced are based on comparing Amazon&#x27;s EC2 vs bare metal.  The EC2 component is a small part of the complete AWS portfolio.[1]  If you&#x27;re doing more complicated websites, you have to <i>include the costs</i> of Linux admins + devops programmers to reinvent what AWS has out of the box. (The non-EC2 services.)  Even if you use OpenStack as a baseline for a &quot;homegrown AWS&quot;, you&#x27;ll still need extensive staffing to configure and customize it for your needs.  It may very well turn out that homegrown on Linode is cheaper but most articles on the web do not have quality cost analysis on the more complicated business scenarios.  Anecdotes yes! But comprehensive unbiased spreadsheets with realistic cost comparisons?!?  No.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;</a>