You can get some decent beef with the new C3 instances, but you have to pay a good chunk of the year upfront (called a reservation) to get the sane rates. If yo

You can get some decent beef with the new C3 instances, but you have to pay a good chunk of the year upfront (called a reservation) to get the sane rates. If you do that, the prices are OK. But you don't come to AWS just for EC2 instances. You're there to combine their portfolio of services in various ways. Because of this, it'd probably be wrong to just compare $1000 on AWS vs what you are paying now.