[hinkley]

I wonder how this is better than buying hardware. Some of the same problems but more flexibility than RI.

[vidarh]

It's not unless you depend on a huge amount of other AWS services. Buying hardware and colocating - or even paying month to month to rent servers from a dedicated hosting provider will typically be much cheaper than reserved instances.

[wongarsu]

Which is likely the reason AWS bandwidth charges are so high. That's their lock-in factor that often makes it infeasible to use cheaper servers elsewhere as long as anything else is on AWS.