I think EC2 is almost always going to be more expensive than bare metal servers, unless you are taking advantage of the ability to pay by the hour, or leveragin

I think EC2 is almost always going to be more expensive than bare metal servers, unless you are taking advantage of the ability to pay by the hour, or leveraging flexible pricing. Reserved instances will save quite a bit of money, but spot pricing can do you even better. Check out this post from a few months ago from someone who is using spot instances for core services, and estimates 70% savings vs on demand pricing. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4662644 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4662644