[NathanKP]

The startup I'm working for has minimal scaling required but we still use AWS despite the higher cost for EC2 because the broad ecosystem of AWS products make it easier to develop interesting things quickly and efficiently.

If we went with all of our own dedicated hardware, or cheaper instances from a different cloud provider then we'd miss out on ELB, have slower and more expensive communication to and from S3, not to mention that services like Elastic Beanstalk make deploying to EC2 instances very easy compared with rolling your own deployment system. And for those who don't want to bother with administrating databases and cache machines RDS and Elasticache are going to be cheapest and fastest if your instances are EC2.

So yeah I agree that EC2 is expensive, but the benefits of living fully within the Amazon ecosystem are pretty large.

[osteele]

I think of AWS as a tool for prototyping and early-stage outsourcing of your infrastructure. Use it when you're fighting past market and technology risk with a single-digit team; consider dropping it in order to optimize costs when you've got more people (including fractional people) to evaluate, configure, and operate alternatives.

[neverminder]

Isn't relying so much on AWS like "putting all your eggs in one basket"?