I just moved a customer off EC2. A small startup. I've billed them about $20k for the work. It will take them ~2.5 months to repay in saved hosting costs at current load levels. But if they're still at current levels in 3 months time, something is wrong. On top of that their ops costs have dropped as we have more control over the environment.
Basically, with rapidly growing hosting needs, getting a more cost effective setup was a matter of survival: They'd be unlikely to close another round of funding in the next few months if they didn't get that cost under control.
I wonder how many startups fail because they don't understand how to get their hosting costs under control, as it's way too common that I see developers that seem to think that servers are basically free, and managers that have no clue they need to seriously question why developers are making the server choices they are making..
