[eloff]

Just having checked out the companies you mentioned, they are cheaper for small-midsize hosting solutions.

For running large memory and bandwidth hungry servers they just can't deliver. On Amazon you can get 256GB of ram with dedicated 10GBps clustered networking. None of the options you listed can go above 1GBps and it won't be dedicated (you'll get a 1GBps port onto a shared network, and you'll be at the mercy of the traffic conditions inside their data center.)

Amazon also has a huge amount of cloudy solutions which is not to be sneezed at.

[ye]

This one allows up to 384GB RAM:

http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/dx290

And it costs a fraction of EC2, which would cost you $2556 for 30.44 days.

I could get 10 servers with 1 Gbit each, and it will still be cheaper than EC2.

[eloff]

Ok, that's interesting. It's non-obvious that it was possible from their site. But the network is still a major problem. 10 servers @ 1gbit are not equal to 1 @ 10gbit depennding on your use case. In my case the database is network limited, and it's extremely not-nice to have to partition it horizontally.