This is looking at one aspect of hosting: your hosting bill at the end of the month. If you are taking advantage of the various services AWS offers, you can sa

This is looking at one aspect of hosting: your hosting bill at the end of the month. If you are taking advantage of the various services AWS offers, you can save development time. For example, if I can get up and running quickly using RDS and save a bunch of time compared to setting up replicated mysql, maintaining backups, etc, I'll gladly pay the extra cost. The same goes for load balancers, memcached, etc. Sure, I can save money in the long run once I've established my app. Initially, I don't want to waste a bunch of time bringing these services up on my own.