We use AWS and this is what I can tell you: 1. Its really expensive: about 5 times as expensive as dedicated servers. 2. Not reliable: they will shoot down se

We use AWS and this is what I can tell you: 1. Its really expensive: about 5 times as expensive as dedicated servers. 2. Not reliable: they will shoot down servers any time they like. You will need to make sure you have redundancies in place and pay for them. 3. Lock-in: their services (beyond EC2) come with a set of proprietary APIs that your app will depend on. This creates a lock in. 4. Still need DevOps: so you pay a lot, get locked-in and still need to put everything together by yourself and make sure it runs reliably? Yep, you still need devops/admins which at the end is probably the biggest cost of your operation. So, here are my suggestions: You have a low-volume and don't mind a lock in: use a dedicated mobile/web cloud ala Firebase/Parse/etc or go with a true PaaS solution like AppEngine/Heroku. If you have a big volume: you will need to bite the bullet, hire some devops and setup+maintain your own dedicated servers. You will at the end pay much less for servers compared to AWS, have full control over hem and have no lock-in.