[icoder]

I think these are good points! I've been held back by AWS prices as well, especially during bootstrapping they are rather high.

The downside you mention at the end, regarding setup time: we use CloudVPS, a Dutch based company that keeps upping its service in the direction of AWS (currently, when your billing status is OK, new VPS-es are setup without human interaction, not milliseconds but still fast enough for most use cases, for new customers you're running a free trial within a working day or so).