I'd be surprised if anyone got discounts as deep as Netflix considering their usage.

For what it's worth, 3.5m/yr is about 0.08% their revenue.

If they were doing this for real, they'd be using reservations; with one-year reservations, the i2.xlarge bit (the servers) cost $905k/year.

For this type of "report" the vendor will usually chuck in the hosting for free. It would have conditions like "can only be used for this test (not anything else" and "results must be published on your blog" etc. etc.

Microsoft do this all the time - its great publicity. It would be interesting to see if they (Microsoft) have something showing similar results...