[krob]

what you're paying for is the capability of scalable architecture, on-demand launch, and heavy redundancy. this very easily acts as a multiplying cost factor and building out your own infrastructure as opposed to leveraging one that can dynamically scale as your needs require. Yes you can get away with paying for your own infrastructure at a third the cost, but then when you compute the cost of all the individual requirements. colocation ISP prices, space, people to manage all of these machines, the software to then scale yourself in equivalence, you eventually end up at w similar cost apples to apples, oranges to oranges if you replicate for yourself exactly what you get through AWS.