[cookiecaper]

This belief is the problem. Most cloud services are not automatically redundant.

They have stuff that will allow you to make your stuff redundant if you know how to architect, configure, and deploy it, but you don't get these benefits just by becoming an AWS customer. You have to know how to set up an ELB just the same as you have to know how to set up haproxy on bare metal.

Is it easier to configure an ELB than a haproxy instance? Probably, but it's not that much harder, and configuration is mostly a one-time cost. Pay someone on staff to spend a couple of hours testing and configuring haproxy or pay 3x more than you should every month to rent VMs on Amazon? Which one is cheaper over "the long term"?

All you're doing is renting some space in a server. The configuration is still mostly up to the user. Hardware requires maintenance, yes, but people are really hamming up both the frequency and difficulty of hardware maintenance.