If you just need compute Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, and several others are all hands down better than EC2 for price/performance. I use Digital Ocean and Vult

If you just need compute Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, and several others are all hands down better than EC2 for price/performance. I use Digital Ocean and Vultr and have had few issues with either of them in the reliability sphere either. If you need permanent always-on systems (inelastic demand) I'd also look into OVH/Kimsufi, since they have extremely good deals on bare metal in their Quebec or French locations. EC2 becomes attractive when you want to use Amazon's whole stack, or when you need the ability to flex up to enormous sizes. I'm not sure I'd bet on the smaller providers being able to hand you 10,000 instances on short notice.