> Unless you are paying thousands of dollars per month, or your time is very cheap doing your own servers will cost you more. This is down to familiarity of to

> Unless you are paying thousands of dollars per month, or your time is very cheap doing your own servers will cost you more. This is down to familiarity of tooling, not some intrinsic advantage that EC2 has over managed dedicated hosting. The simple matter is that there just isn't the maturity of tools around automated provisioning of dedicated hosts, which makes them seem higher overhead. > If AWS were so expensive and "not worth it" what are the guys from Netflix smoking? ;) Simple: Netflix have very bursty load, so it costs them less to pay the EC2 and virtualisation premium than it would to keep an equivalent amount of dedicated hardware on warm standby. Is your load bursty? Then EC2 might make sense. EC2 (or any cloud virtualisation platform) will always lose in a shootout with managed dedicated hardware, unless the shootout parameters are provisioning time and tooling, simply because EC2 is managed dedicated hardware plus an extra layer of stuff on top that has to be paid for.