As a startup guy and recovering sysadmin, I really admire the Amazon Web Services effort. It started out small and ugly, but they have marched ever onward, slowly improving things and adding new features. Five years of steady plodding can get you pretty far.
That is pretty pricey. 1GB of RAM from crucial is $10. 1 GB of Memcache from AWS, (assuming 3 year amortization) $1900.<p>Obviously there is overhead, but if you have machines already and they are not maxed out on RAM then the $10/GB price is not far of the real cost.