There is absolutely a tradeoff (as with everything in life) but in the context of this thread talking about scale with 100s of millions of requests, gigabytes of bandwidth and large spikes - it&#x27;s far better to just host your own load balancers.<p>Most people (and apps) likely won&#x27;t hit this scale so ELB is just fine. If you do though, ELB is just pricey and not really that great.