Staging is one aspect of hosting. I will go even further and say that because a staging environment needs to mimic the production environment as close as possib

Staging is one aspect of hosting. I will go even further and say that because a staging environment needs to mimic the production environment as close as possible it should be hosted by the same vendor too. You're right that if you compare numbers directly, some aspects of EC2 are more expensive than other vendors. My point is that AWS offers greater value by allowing you to do things you can't do anywhere else. Allocating static IP addresses on the fly for example.