[dpark]

You're right. If you run fairly low volume services that don't need significant scale, you can possibly achieve better uptime than Amazon. You'll probably spend significantly more to get it, though, since your low volume service probably could run on a cheap VM instead of a dedicated physical server.

You're also likely rolling the dice on your uptime, since a hardware failure becomes catastrophic unless you are building redundancy (in which case you're almost certainly spending far more than you would with Amazon).

[kuschku]

Actually, I’ve calculated the costs – if you only need to build for one special case, even with redundancy you tend to be always ~3-4 times cheaper than the AWS/Google/etc offerings for the same.

But then again, you have only one special case, and can’t run anything else on that.