Tangentially, I was just looking at the possibility of hosting a file on Amazon S3, and it's astonishing how expensive it is. They want $0.15/GB for bandwidth.

In contrast, Linode sells bandwidth for $0.10/GB, and that comes with a whole VPS. So if I pay $160/month, I get 16TB of bandwidth on a VPS with 4GiB of RAM and 128GiB of storage (oh, and Linode pools your bandwidth across all nodes). On S3, $160 will buy me a little over 10TB of bandwidth, nevermind storage or anything else.

I understand that these cloud services are the most convenient way to scale, and probably the best way to absorb an unexpected spike in usage. But they seem to charge a roughly 50% premium for every resource, as compared to a reliable VPS provider with great customer service, an API that lets you set up temporary servers, etc.