Just wanted to relay my own experience, don't mean to stir up any love-hate discussions about AWS. I support IT infrastructures for small businesses and have been working the numbers with every new deployment. Anymore, the cost of doing it on your own with your own hardware and physical location is by far higher than building it on AWS. I run most of my servers in spot instance and even in a month like last month that was expensive for spot instances, the monthly running cost was still below cost of reserved instances. When you total running, storage and IOs cost for a three year span you will come up with less of what you would have spent on your own data center. And all that is paid in monthly payments for resources used as opposed to lump sum purchase or worse, interest bearing payments for your own physical infrastructure. If you can get away with placing your infrastructure a WAN link away from your physical location then don't be wasting your time and money with building your own data center. AWS had a bad outage last month and of course it pissed me off but I stick with them because their prices are unbeatable and their services are constantly improving with new ones coming out every year. I did not mean to make this sounds like an AWS infomartial, just to relay my own experience and considerations with regard to the topic this article covered.