I would say, everything considered (thus inevitably comparing apples and oranges at least in some respect), hosting options ordered by longer-term cost from lowest to highest:
1. colocation w/ yours or your admin team physical access
2. AWS
3. normal hosting
And I've put AWS on the 2nd place only due to the ability of replacing or scaling your hardware in minutes.
It's good to know that for $11k a year (paid upfront) plus traffic costs one can run their biggest GPU instance on 10GigE connection, or a 60 GB RAM machine on a normal connection.
I think AWS is absolutely unbeatable for startups where you are not sure about the success upfront.
Also, I'm running my Node.js sites on a Micro instance which I have free for the first year, and $16/mo onwards.
I wish the downvote action here on HN included a mandatory reason textbox where you'd have to write why you have downvoted, and this action itself would be downvotable. So much political bullshit going on here.
1. colocation w/ yours or your admin team physical access
2. AWS
3. normal hosting
And I've put AWS on the 2nd place only due to the ability of replacing or scaling your hardware in minutes.
It's good to know that for $11k a year (paid upfront) plus traffic costs one can run their biggest GPU instance on 10GigE connection, or a 60 GB RAM machine on a normal connection.
I think AWS is absolutely unbeatable for startups where you are not sure about the success upfront.
Also, I'm running my Node.js sites on a Micro instance which I have free for the first year, and $16/mo onwards.