So Amazon uses some of the same technology (Xen); but their packaging, support infrastructure, and pricing model make it very different than a VPS offering. VP

So Amazon uses some of the same technology (Xen); but their packaging, support infrastructure, and pricing model make it very different than a VPS offering. VPS you typically get bandwidth, storage, etc. included - and its 'uncomplicated' - You pay one monthly fee, it covers it all. AWS can be viewed as both fault tolerant, and additional probability of fault due to the extra complexity they've built in (they've gone down for substantial periods due to hiccups in this additional complexity). A good VPS provider will make the particular system you're on fault-tolerant on its own: dual power supplies, RAID arrays, etc. AWS doesn't care about making any particular machine fault-tolerant, because their model is that you should spin up a new instance, and throw away the one that failed. Thats great for a 'web-scale' enterprise that has invested the resources making their site operational for that mindset. For early-stage startups where dealing with a failed instance means their site is down until they create or restart a new one; the advantage goes to VPS IMHO.