Here in Europe dedicated machines are so cheap (100$/month for QuadCore CPU, 24GB RAM, 2x1.5TB SATA) that most startups and companies just order a bunch of dedi

Here in Europe dedicated machines are so cheap (100$/month for QuadCore CPU, 24GB RAM, 2x1.5TB SATA) that most startups and companies just order a bunch of dedicated servers [1][2]. Hetzner[1] e.g. has pre-provisioned servers running that get delivered within 10 minutes (24/7) (if you're a customer). You can also cancel every server every month. And they have an API [3]), too (I made a Ruby gem for that[4]) This pretty much kills all needs to use AWS or any other cloud provider for 98% of all startups/projects. Ah, btw, they've 10 times [5] the connection of e.g. AWS Europe and provide native IPv6. [1] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq8 http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq8 [2] http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/dedicated_offers.xml http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/dedicated_offers.xml [3] http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Robot_Webservice_en http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Robot_Webservice_en [4] http://github.com/rmoriz/hetzner-api http://github.com/rmoriz/hetzner-api [5] check on http://bgp.he.net/ http://bgp.he.net/