[nasalgoat]

At my previous company, I built a dedicated hardware system that consistently delivered a sub-second response time at a cost of about a third of what it would cost to host on AWS.

After I left, the new CTO who replaced me migrated it Rackspace's cloud offering. I don't know the costs involved, but now the site averages an 8s load time.

You can't really beat the raw performance for the price of dedicated equipment.