At the same time you just pointed to one of the flaws in your argument that EC2 is overpriced: You are comparing two services which are very different. It's eve

At the same time you just pointed to one of the flaws in your argument that EC2 is overpriced: You are comparing two services which are very different. It's even right there in the name: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2 allows for elasticity and scalability and therefore is not very strong in the pet-project market. If you want to talk about a rip-off, compare it with Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine or some other services and identify in your post on which grounds you compare them. A dedicated server has very little in common with an EC2 instance. I bet you could buy a laptop for less than 100 USD, install your LAMP server on it an connect it to any leased line to get superior performance to an EC2 instance. But you lose all the advantages EC2 was created to have.