Slicehost can be cheaper because of the included bandwidth, but AWS can be really helpful too. Here's two examples: Database server. EBS is a high-performanc

Slicehost can be cheaper because of the included bandwidth, but AWS can be really helpful too. Here's two examples: Database server. EBS is a high-performance disk system offering speeds of 70MB/s in the real world. Databases love fast disks. Slicehost's disks are slow (at least for high performance databases). Xen doesn't have great disk access speed and they're just plain old local disks. So, if you need to scale up a database, AWS is going to accommodate that better. Infinidisk! With Slicehost, you have a fixed disk size and you can't buy more. With EBS, you can just keep getting more and more disk - you can even stripe volumes so that they show up as a single disk to your instance. Life is about trade-offs. I love Slicehost and use them for all my stuff. I've set up EC2 stuff for other people who wanted it. So, it really depends on what you need.