i don't know if this is true or not, but it isn't at all necessary.
you can just buy everything on an operating lease for a fraction of what amazon or any other provider charges and write the payment off without any sort of depreciation schedule or hit to your cash or unnecessarily grow the balance sheet/liabilities.
how do you think it's possible that you can easily get a $15/month dedicated server?
Sorry makes no sense to me.
Even taking into account depreciation, administration, maintenance etc, if you have a large enough consistent need amazon is not the lowest cost option by a significant margin. This isn't a controversial statement.
Also, presumably, not all the AWS users are awake at the same time ;-)
yeah, they sure do.
The cloud providers are in a cut throat business (mitigated somewhat by value added services), so the price will bob along near cost (though they may eak out more profit on some work loads compared to others).