I did the math for my own applications and found that Amazon's system is competitive pricewise with something I can set up in a data center that has acceptable

I did the math for my own applications and found that Amazon's system is competitive pricewise with something I can set up in a data center that has acceptable reliability (RAID1 + "enterprise backup" that may or may not pull through in a pinch) If you consider that a home-rolled solution is not elastic to demand and therefore I'd probably wind up with a capacity factor < 50%, it's a wash pricewise. Meanwhile, I know the AMZN-based system is going to make me sleep easy when it comes to business continuity nightmares.