Late to the party, but if an EC2 instance is 20% the cost of a bare-metal machine, then you can buy 4 more than you need and just have them in reserve. And yes

Late to the party, but if an EC2 instance is 20% the cost of a bare-metal machine, then you can buy 4 more than you need and just have them in reserve. And yes, AWS EC2 is about 20% the cost of a fully managed bare-metal provider where you never even have to physically see your server if you don't want to. People have weird notions about how expensive servers are these days. Colo/Cooling is indeed less flexible, but the cost benefits are so insane that it doesn't need to be very flexible.