I think you are looking at this from the wrong perspective. The idea is that you only pay for what you use. 2 dedicated servers means you always pay for the whole thing, plus you have to be the sys admin and a few other things. Jelastic eliminates that layer and it only charges you for what you actually use. I doubt you need to dedicated servers full time to run an app. The idea behind automated scaling is that you eliminate the costs associated with hosting. I come from a hosting background and this is a HUGE cost saving measure. Even if you get a sys admin for super cheap (Eastern EU or a BRIC country), it would still be cheaper to use Jelastic. All that said, another issue with mirrored, dedicated servers would be the issue of one going down: with Jelastic you won't have that issue.