Ask HN: Why is ec2 so popular?

A few months ago I was looking at some hosting for a web app I built and I had signed up for the ec2 free trail. Then I started looking at the pricing differences, a place like hetzner is much cheaper than EC2. For example if you were to get a x1 large on ec2 it would cost you 2x of hetzner with the 3 year reserved option and you would have a pay a big chunk up front + all the extra fees. Without the reserved pricing the cost jumps to 5-6x. For someone who wants to bootstrap I couldn't imagine picking ec2.

Even if you liked the ability to scale quickly for the amount you spending you can just extra capacity at some other place and still pay the same amount, or in the worst case use ec2 as your backup.