[matt_wulfeck]

Why do you say they're overpriced? I would say for most apps their downright cheap. Especially since you spend so little time tinkering/monitoring/worrying about them. Most people just want to work on their app not manage Nginx configs.

[manigandham]

There is absolutely a tradeoff (as with everything in life) but in the context of this thread talking about scale with 100s of millions of requests, gigabytes of bandwidth and large spikes - it's far better to just host your own load balancers.

Most people (and apps) likely won't hit this scale so ELB is just fine. If you do though, ELB is just pricey and not really that great.