Here's some cases that I've handled with AWS that justifies the cost: - About a month ago, our database filled up, both in space and IOPS required. We do sizea

Here's some cases that I've handled with AWS that justifies the cost: - About a month ago, our database filled up, both in space and IOPS required. We do sizeable operations every day, and jobs were stacking up. I clicked a couple buttons and upgraded our RDS instance in-place, with no downtime. - We were going through a security audit. We spun up an identical clone of production and ran the audit against that, so we didn't disrupt normal operations if anything crashy was found. - Our nightly processing scaled poorly on a single box, and we turned on a bunch of new customers to find that our nightly jobs now took 30 hours. We were in the middle of a feature crunch and had no time to re-write any of the logic. We spun up a bunch of new instances with cron jobs and migrated everything that day. 100% worth it for a small business that's focused on features. Every minute I don't mess with servers is a minute I can talk to customers.