Given that there is a 10x price difference in some cases, I would doubt this. The bigger a company is, the more sense colo or dedicated makes. You don't have t

Given that there is a 10x price difference in some cases, I would doubt this. The bigger a company is, the more sense colo or dedicated makes. You don't have to manage a datacenter just because you don't go for Amazon. There's tons of companies that will do it for you, at various levels. You want colo space, nothing more ? Fine. You want dedi hosts with a few of your own machines in between ? No problems. On top of that, a lot of dedicated server companies will have spare instance so spinning up new devices is certainly easy enough. Feel free to contact me if you need solutions like this. I think there's one huge advantage of Amazon : management effectively doesn't get to set policy on the datacenter, so they don't get to screw it up. An internal company department would use something like VMWare and won't let you spin something up without endless approvals, whereas Amazon treats you like a customer.