You can beat AWS on cost with pretty much any hosting provider (with some exceptions - e.g. Rackspace seems almost proud to be expensive). The 33% to 70% &quot;discount&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean much when you then tie yourself into long term costs that are far more limiting than most manage hosting providers - so much for benefits of being able to scale up and down.<p>What really kills you on AWS are the insane bandwidth prices. Buying bandwidth elsewhere is often so much cheaper than AWS that the difference in bandwidth costs alone more than finances the servers.