that's comparing an orange with the produce section of a supermarket; AWS is much more than virtual machines; for just a box with a set cpu, memory, disk and ba

that's comparing an orange with the produce section of a supermarket; AWS is much more than virtual machines; for just a box with a set cpu, memory, disk and bandwidth you're right that it's cheaper to rent a dedicated server and even cheaper to co-locate. Plus even for a single server with a cloud provider you still get advantages like one-click snapshot, monitoring dashboard etc etc. For production/serious servers looking at price alone is not the best idea; what about other features like reliability (uptime), support etc.