[BDangIT]

I feel your pain. I just attended a NoSQL conference this week and my head is spinning with the amount of service providers and solutions there exists. One day, I'd like to extend my calculator to include doing a full blown IaaS vs PaaS comparo.

To answer your question, getting a good handle of knowing your operation costs has happened after the fact your servers were spinning. Most of my clients assumed that going to Cloud will help you save money. That has not been the case and I had to keep calculating costs over and over again.