However you slice it, $150/mo is only $1800/year. Let's say you want to launch some new site targeting the public consumer internet where you would like to see hundreds of thousands of people on your site. You're not going to get there first. You have two options - either put forth the engineering effort to properly test your server and get it to scale up to the many thousands of concurrent level or launch in a series of betas with increasingly more people. There is certainly a case for getting the software ready, launching it and then doing a marketing push and if you get a hit on some major service, the site is ready to go - I think it puts forth a more professional air. Now, I have reviewed slicehost more since this discussion and there may be a significant way to reduce cost there... but it is also not as feature rich as the whole AWS suite.