The other thing that would be interesting to look at would be the cost of running an alternative implementation on a more standard platform. What would be the c

The other thing that would be interesting to look at would be the cost of running an alternative implementation on a more standard platform. What would be the cost of running the same application on AWS VM's, for example? Is Amazon trying to extract a profit? Unless they are using specialized hardware, can they really execute this service any cheaper than you could? Or do they pad the billing to fund Amazon? Why would I go with a likely much more expensive option (I'd be pretty surprised if Amazon's billings for this service scale linearly with their costs) instead of the option that provides more traditional cost scaling?