Am I the only one who remembers how shady a lot of those VPS/hosting companies were? Seemed to be a race to the bottom, so a 'good' outfit might suck or completely disappear a couple years later. (Also, pricing was all over the map, I had a client who was paying $150/mo for a VPS.) Hetzner survived, but for a long time they had a reputation as spamfarm. So I get the initial appeal of AWS, used tactically. But for larger companies, its something like IBM or Oracle, if you are price-sensitive, it's not for you.