>When these guys get within 25% +/- of dedicated hosting on price for what you get (specifically ram, bandwidth, processor), I'll switch immediately. They have

>When these guys get within 25% +/- of dedicated hosting on price for what you get (specifically ram, bandwidth, processor), I'll switch immediately. They have a long ways to go. A "medium" instance is 3.75 GB of ram and 2 computer units (equivalent to one dual core processor). If you know you're going to use this constantly (24x7, or close to it- 8760 hours) then you can take advantage of the reserved instance pricing. At 8760 hours a year, $390 for the reserved pricing and $0.032 an hour you get a price for this server of $670.32 (or $55.86 a month). The downside is that this does not cover bandwidth. Most datacenters are willing to give you a decent chunk as part of the package (like 2000GB or something), knowing that most people won't use it. Even if you don't count that though Amazon is still a bit pricier- Softlayer sells bandwidth at 0.10/GB (in packs of 1000), while Amazon is at 0.12/GB for the first 10TB (after which it becomes cheaper at $0.08/GB). The point being, there are many situations in which Amazing is already cheaper- let alone within 25%. The new levels of reserved instances have really evened things out a bit.