To be fair though, even with a setup like this you can still use Cloudfront, or any number of other 3rd party CDNs. Most of these providers including Cloudfront

To be fair though, even with a setup like this you can still use Cloudfront, or any number of other 3rd party CDNs. Most of these providers including Cloudfront offer 'remote origin' features/configurations. I agree that AWS offers much more than hosting, but when talking about hosting specifically the numbers are clearly better with 'bare metal' (rented or otherwise) -- it's just substantially more power per dollar. You'll need to do a cost-benefit for your own situation so YMMV of course, just as it would with any other provider or any other service your business may choose to subcontract.