[berkay]

Not sure why it has to be without EC2 to be useful. The main benefit is indeed the fact that you can have VMs, queue, load balancers, databases, DNS, cache, etc. all using consistent APIs, etc. You can create dev/test environments that are as close to prod as possible with fraction of the cost, etc.

In our case (and I'm pretty sure we're not in the fringe) when you consider all costs including the administrative overhead, etc. EC2 costs are not significant portion of the cost. Just to give an idea, for us, even if someone had offered VM hosting for free, it would not be cost effective for us to move. For a company that have very high processing requirements it could be a different story. I just wanted to mention that the value added by services in addition to EC2 is sufficiently high that even if EC2 costs are higher than alternative (and they are higher), AWS can still provide significant savings.

Time of a highly skilled dev/ops person is (very) valuable, and not something we can buy more of easily. Anything that saves us time, implement faster pays for itself pretty easily. If you don't have a massive EC2 bill, chances are AWS overall is a good proposition.

[waps]

Considering just how much more expensive AWS is, I have my doubts on this. AWS also really likes "hiding" costs, like bandwidth costs. It's not obvious that most sites will go over the bandwidth limit and pay extra, whereas for sites on VPS providers, this won't happen. In reality they have a billion different line items on every bill, and most are not mentioned on their pricing pages.

Expect to pay a LOT more than you'd expect to pay from the pricing page.

I don't get the whole line of reasoning : either your project is not important and having weekly or monthly backups is certainly sufficient. In such a case, having a script to backup a VPS is by far the most cost efficient way to run the project.

If your project is important enough to have a complex AWS setup, you have an admin anyway.

"But you can trust amazon". Well, no : http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-lost-data-2011-4 (note that disasters on VPS/dedicated servers are also rare)

If you're making complex AWS setups because "it's cool", then by all means, but keep in mind that you're paying a lot for the privilege. Don't do this on production.

[berkay]

I can only give you a datapoint. This has not been the case in our case. We never paid more than what we expected.

If you think VPS providers is an alternative to AWS, you have an entirely different use case than ours. For an application with high availability requirements, messages queues, scalable data store, etc. admin work is not "monthly backups". Implementing and maintaining highly available load balancing, message queues, data stores, DNS, auto scaling, etc. all require a lot of work, and often skills that you may not have in the team. AWS makes these tasks easier. You still have to do admin work, but much less of it, and don't have to be expert at each one. That's worth a lot.