[tgeek]

"Except every other provider enables swap by default."

This is false and 100% incorrect.

Most AMI's on AWS don't enable SWAP by default whether supplied by a 3rd party or AWS themselves. Its not a forced thing either way.

In October Rackspace announced that they would be getting rid of SWAP by default: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/changes-to...

Linux VM's in Azure don't have Swap by default: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/07/29/swap...

On any host, physical or not, with more than 2GB of RAM people haven't run SWAP for years now. On cloud providers, even hosts with less than 2GB it is rarely worth it. It has horrible performance ramifications even when backed by SSD for the local host and any other tenants on that shared host.

This isn't a scam or them trying to upsell you. This is smart people who know systems operations making the right call for their customers.