AWS fits the niche of "holy fuck my site is blowing up and I don't want it to crumble while I onboard new users or some event is going on". You probably should

AWS fits the niche of "holy fuck my site is blowing up and I don't want it to crumble while I onboard new users or some event is going on". You probably shouldn't use it for day to day ops but it's a really good spillway for extremely temporary & particularly for unexpected spikes of traffic. Of course you could argue that AWS is particularly bad but I think this applies to most non-bare-metal instance cloud services.