they're not insanely good, they're just very close to the cost of the actual financed hardware. AWS et al. charge insane markups because people fall for their

they're not insanely good, they're just very close to the cost of the actual financed hardware. AWS et al. charge insane markups because people fall for their marketing, which is cleverly disguised as spec sheets and technical documentation and other things engineers who think they are not susceptible to marketing fall easily for. someone's paying for all those free AWS instances, and it ain't the low end customers. edit: if you want to know the true price of the hardware, take the purchase price of your standard supermicro server, and multiply it by .025 - that's what big companies pay per month for hardware, usually on 3-year leases. i.e. $10,000 box = costs $250/month. A decent cloud provider can usually get about $3000+ a month of revenue off of a box like that. even after you add power, networking, staff, it's still a large markup.