Well, I always see it this way: With Amazon you never pay for the actual hardware, because that would be a rip-off. You pay for the service of not having to "throw out old machines", you pay for being able to start a machine with one click, you pay for the services around (S3, Dynamo, ELB, Route 53 etc.) and ultimately, you pay for not having to care about 80% of infrastructure problems.