But here's the kicker. Since we started on AWS we were able to keep our costs fairly low at the beginning and as we grew we never had to make any long term proj

But here's the kicker. Since we started on AWS we were able to keep our costs fairly low at the beginning and as we grew we never had to make any long term projections. We simply added capacity (literally) on a weekly basis. The exact same thing can be said for renting dedicated servers. You can add new ones at any time and it's fairly quick. This is exactly how we scaled up as well. Adding new servers day to day as required. Yes, it takes 4 hours rather than 4 minutes but unless you are dynamically scaling up and down throughout the day in direct response to load, you are not using the versatility that you are paying for with AWS. Few people are. Once you start to buy into the AWS ecosystem you begin to reap some serious benefits. You simply cannot think of AWS as just EC2 instances. Of course, the trade-off by going all in is some level of lock-in (though this can easily be minimized). And there is nothing stopping you using these other cloud services without EC2. If you look around at other vendors, you might even be surprised at the prices you can get. For example, we worked out at one point that in our case CloudFront would cost over over $50,000 per month for what we were paying about $4000 per month with a different CDN.