That doesn't sound reasonable at all to me. Unless you are building your own cloud service or doing something out of the ordinary (for which cloud wouldn't be a

That doesn't sound reasonable at all to me. Unless you are building your own cloud service or doing something out of the ordinary (for which cloud wouldn't be a good fit anyway), the hardware you run on has absolutely nothing to do with your business. Take the shortest/cheapest path and move on. To be fair to the Stack Overflow guys, AWS had fewer offerings when SO was built, so the comparison wasn't the same then as it is now.