AWS is a 10 billion$ business and Azure is the closest competition. Often, I hear from prospects that their negligence, lack of discipline to carefully manage their resources result in 30% more cloud cost. There are tons of tools helping you to optimize and save you cloud cost. Do you use any or what are you doing int his regard?
I tend to "buy in bulk" to save money on everything. It's a blessing and a curse: a blessing because I save a lot of money over the long-term, but a curse because I have to spend more upfront. This goes for everything from my grocery shopping to my shopping online.<p>So to save costs online...<p>I use DreamObjects from DreamHost. It is pretty much AWS but with DH branding. I registered for it when it first came out and was considered "beta" and nabbed a deal where I have 2¢/GB of storage up to 1TB of data. But their other plans aren't bad at all.<p>At one point I had DreamPress for $16 a month, which was their optimized WordPress hosting, which normally costs $19.95 a month, but I managed to grab that in beta as well. Eventually, I let this go and moved my websites over to the Cloud.<p>When I first signed up for DreamHost, I purchased their "Happy Hosting" (Shared Hosting) plan for 10 years which puts my hosting costs at $5.95 a month. Then I just charge my clients that price and it has paid for itself. As far as cloud costs go... DreamHost also released an amazing product called DreamCompute, which gives me cloud computing @ 512 MB for $4.50 or 1 GB for $6.00, with a 80 GB of storage space and 100 GB storage block. Free bandwidth for the time being.<p>Affiliate link if interested: <a href="http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?1405127" rel="nofollow">http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?1405127</a><p>I have gotten some great deals... but have missed out on a lot too. I had gotten AWS once and hosted my website there and somehow managed to wrack up so much on an invoice that I pretty much emailed Amazon and told them to give me a refund because... for a website that wasn't active, bots slammed it, and I was being charged for the bandwidth. Luckily, they refunded the entire price. So I've just found a better solution and savings with DreamHost.<p>My average costs per month, not counting the Shared Hosting that I already pre-paid for, are about $8-$10 a month for hosting my images on DreamHost's AWS (DreamObjects) and my websites now on DreamHost's Cloud Servers (DreamCompute). I've never really had any "surprise" charges on my invoice like I did just giving AWS a trial run. Definitely recommend.