You can easily get 10x the performance for the same cost.
I'm not saying AWS isn't awesome...I'm saying it's much, much more expensive, and I'm surprised that startups full of tech people don't manage their own servers.
You can rent 20 AWS on-demand large instances for less money than a junior engineer. If you don't need a lot of machines and AWS saves you any time at all over dedicated hosting, then it's worth it.
I'm just very surprised that more startups don't have people who both enjoy the experience and are good at it.
Also, people make it sound like EC2 is management-free. It isn't. It might take less time, which is important, and the problems might be different, but it isn't a fire-and-forget solution.
It's been covered a lot of times...here's one that just appeared on HN a few days ago: http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-...
You can easily get 10x the performance for the same cost.
I'm not saying AWS isn't awesome...I'm saying it's much, much more expensive, and I'm surprised that startups full of tech people don't manage their own servers.