> Though $3,499/month is WAY above what a small company like mine can afford.

In order to host a HIPAA-compliant application on Amazon, there is a $1,500/month per-zone fee. This does not even count the actual server or storage costs, let alone the costs of building (and then maintaining) a complaint server application plus managing the documentation for it.

You also have to pay this fee again if you want to host the application in a second region (e.g. for failover/redundancy).

So, an extra $2000/month to forget about all of those is a signficant cost, but still a reasonable price.