That's something I don't really understand about all these offerings. They're all crazily expensive. There's small differences, but not much. Rackspace is a tiny bit cheaper, with significant disadvantages, google and aws are roughly the same (I get the impression google is more expensive, but better for cpu workloads).

Compare it to any "standard" vps offering and they're insanely expensive. Compared to the vast majority of dedicated hosters they're insanely expensive. Plus you're the only one on your cpu/memory/disk.

Anybody with a monthly AWS spend of $100 or more could have 2 dedicated servers, one in .eu, one in the US, for 20-30% less dollars, 5-10x more cpu, 32 Gig of dedicated memory or more, 100x more bandwitdth (and no surprise overuse charges, finding hosters that just "limit" you to 10 mbit is easy), everything non-shared and good support. Hetzner ES40 is EUR 40/month, 32Gig ram, 2Tb disk, unlimited bandwidth, similar offerings are available in the US (e.g. www.ovh.com.ca ).

Total spend for effectively ~ m3.2xlarge instance, one in US, one in EU : $120.

AWS spend for a comparable config : 1 month of m3.2xlarge : $650 5/10 Tb of internet facing traffic: $600/$1200

I think this is being generous to AWS, because an m3/2xlarge does not match the specifications of the dedicated server offerings.

Granted, these services are not as flexible as AWS. At the prices they offer though, is there anyone who really argues AWS is better for anything but their free tier ? As for the "extras" amazon offers : since they're all proprietary businesses, every amazon extra you use (e.g. S3) is something you're betting the business on.

And since none of the aws/google/... offerings are anywhere near what I want (just set this .jar in my homedirectory live, ditto for go binaries, or move-tag-and-push git publishing), I have to script stuff to make that happen anyway (I love docker).

Why does AWS have customers at all ?