> This is roughly equivalent to 4 m4.xlarge's ($0.086/hour each at 3 year reserved pricing) and 2TB SSD EBS disk ($200/month) or around $450/month. Add in a TB

> This is roughly equivalent to 4 m4.xlarge's ($0.086/hour each at 3 year reserved pricing) and 2TB SSD EBS disk ($200/month) or around $450/month. Add in a TB of outbound data for $100, so that's $550/month. How about this one ? https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex41s https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex41s That's, including network bandwidth, 40 euros/month. The commit is one month, not three years. And redundancy is a problem, fair enough. How about we take two in every continent, and still comfortably beat you on price ? You might say that the cpu is not equivalent, but I'll discuss that below. Everything else is obviously equivalent or better. At this point you've got WAY more of everything, including reliability, for a significantly lower price. Everything. Network bandwidth, cpu capacity, disk, memory, everything. And this is metal, not virtualized performance. So aside from many tasks performing better (anything that isn't pure compute, anything that needs to use the network, disk, ... whatever), you're also way safer, you actually get to use the memory ... 4x m4.xlarge will give you, in total 16 "vcpu" on a 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon® E5-2676 v3 (most likely), plus 64 gigs of ram. The i7 runs at 4Ghz, with significantly less cache (takes 3 of them have more cache than 1 Xeon). However, since this isn't virtualized it's going to matter a LOT less. You see you are trying to compare 2/3 of a single xeon cpu in a quad-xeon server virtualized against 100% of a dual xeon server. Surprise ! The 100% dual xeon is more expensive. In reality that R530 is equivalent to 12 m4.xlarges. So apples to apples, however, non-cloud is absurdly much cheaper. And I'm being polite here, not pointing out that 100G of internet bandwidth is nothing, and just how much that Hetzner server includes, or your example hosted R530 (will definitely come with, in the worst case possible, 40T, and if you want better prices than that, feel free to contact me) > > This cloud scaling is only useful if your credit card can handle 50x the charges > If you can't pay for your infrastructure it doesn't matter whether you're on cloud servers or not. True, but every big company got big by producing more value for less money. Not hosting on cloud is going to make the less money part a lot easier.