This is looking at one aspect of hosting: your hosting bill at the end of the month.
If you are taking advantage of the various services AWS offers, you can save development time. For example, if I can get up and running quickly using RDS and save a bunch of time compared to setting up replicated mysql, maintaining backups, etc, I'll gladly pay the extra cost.
The same goes for load balancers, memcached, etc. Sure, I can save money in the long run once I've established my app. Initially, I don't want to waste a bunch of time bringing these services up on my own.
If you are taking advantage of the various services AWS offers, you can save development time. For example, if I can get up and running quickly using RDS and save a bunch of time compared to setting up replicated mysql, maintaining backups, etc, I'll gladly pay the extra cost.
The same goes for load balancers, memcached, etc. Sure, I can save money in the long run once I've established my app. Initially, I don't want to waste a bunch of time bringing these services up on my own.