Lets take the m2.4xlarge reserved instance type, it costs somewhere around $2k/month on AWS, but with a "generic hosting provider" it costs about %10-15 of that

Lets take the m2.4xlarge reserved instance type, it costs somewhere around $2k/month on AWS, but with a "generic hosting provider" it costs about %10-15 of that. Don't forget the 5-20% virtualization performance penalty either. The tradeoff is that for $2k you can get it pretty quickly and shut it down whenever you want, but if you spend more than 80hrs a month with that in use you should really get a dedicated resource somewhere else...