[moonboots]

I think most people realize aws charges a premium for the ability to scale up and down, but at least for me, the magnitude of the price difference was nevertheless surprising. Some of the services Amazon offers will certainly be worth the premium for a subset of customers. However, the price difference makes other features like auto scaling moot because you can overprovision servers at Hetzner and still have a much lower price.

[janzer]

Anyone that is running servers for a large percentage of the time should be using reserved instances that are priced much lower than the on demand prices shown here. For example for a small instance that runs constantly, using a heavy utilization reserved instance would cost $335.16 for a year compared to $700.80 with on demand pricing.

[taligent]

I know what you mean. I only realised AFTER I had put in the all the effort to deploy my apps.

Actually one of the best ways to go is to find dedicated hosting providers in the same data center. For example Server Beach is faster at accessing Amazon SQS than Amazon EC2 is.