Here's something interesting about the pricing structure: if you get a spot instance, and bid like $5/hr max for it, you won't get overbid for it, and your hourly cost is going to be far less than outright buying the reserve instance itself if you need it longterm.

This graph is very confusing. On the X-axis are dates, and on the Y-axis are some unspecified numbers, perhaps price.

I realize that many here need to plan for extremely bursty or massively scalable setups, but for 99% of applications AWS seems lousy in terms of SLA and overpriced for what you get.

You can get premium colocation for a 1U or 2U server for $200 a month, ie. $2400 per year.

This premium colocation comes with phone and email support for most basic Linux and networking tasks, 100% network and power uptime guarantees, etc.

AWS does not offer much support unless you pay more, and as we have seen in the past, they do have outages.

A server from Aberdeeninc.com (price for 1 server without negotiation or shopping around), far superior to an xlarge, is about $3100 including shipping (Stirling 169 1U, 2x 5504 CPUs (8 cores), 24GB RAM, 2x 500GB Seagate 32MB cache).

Meanwhile an xlarge RS will cost almost $4k per year.

So, over 3 years: AWS xlarge: $12K

Premium colo + 1U server: $7200 plus $3100 = $10.3K .

And that is for just one instance.

I would be very interested in hearing real-world testing results of what an AWS compute unit actually ends up being comparable to vs. a relatively modern CPU like the quad core Opterons and Xeons.