It seems people often gloss over the issue of redundancy when making these comparisons as well. If the server hosting your EC2 instance fails, you just bring u

It seems people often gloss over the issue of redundancy when making these comparisons as well. If the server hosting your EC2 instance fails, you just bring up a replacement and continue on your way. If you are on a traditional VPS, you either have to bring up a new instance from backup, or wait for the provider to get things running again, but at least they have some strong motivation to since multiple customers are down. If you have a rented or coloed server, you have to wait for someone to fix it, with shorter guaranteed turn-around times costing you more. You might be able to make the case that you could deploy an app on a single EC2 instance because in the event of failure, your downtime probably runs much less than an hour. Downtime due to a hardware problem on a rented or coloed server is likely to be much more than that. Maybe that tradeoff is acceptable to keep the costs down, but it is a tradeoff. If you aren't willing to make that tradeoff, your cheaper rented or coloed server is actually two servers, with a rough doubling in costs.