This goes for any hosting service and not just AWS as long as we are not talking about VPSes though. I just did the math on what using S3 instead of my current

This goes for any hosting service and not just AWS as long as we are not talking about VPSes though. I just did the math on what using S3 instead of my current business class shared hosting plan would cost me for one of my audio streaming sites. I have around 10-15GBs of data which gets rotated regularly, so nothing is kept around for longer than around two months. With the amount of traffic I get, around 70GBs per month, and the number hits I get, I still pay less for my business class shared hosting plan than I would pay for S3. And I also have full shell access and scriptability. To top it off my plan actually covers 1TB traffic a month, so my site could scale up to 12 times traffic-wise before I would need to upgrade my account. At that cross-over point Amazon S3 would still be 54% more expensive than my current solution. This might not apply to everyone, but in my case getting S3 would be plain dumb.