There's a LOT of space between saint and tyrant, and I'd guess that Amazon falls into that space (as almost everybody does).<p>Regarding your 'Tyrant' arguments:
* EBS sucks and they can't seem to ever fix it<p>Maybe durable, reliable, cheap and flexible storage isn't that easy to do?<p>* Beanstalk is a terrible excuse for a PaaS<p>Haven't used it, so I can't really comment.<p>* Completely locked into the AWS ecosystem<p>How so? I mean, they have a few proprietaryish services, but at least from my usage, I haven't found anything that I couldn't replace with something else. SNS? Email. EC2? Dedicated server. Elastic Block? Disks. I haven't used Dynamo, but I got the sense that it was just another NoSQL store?<p>* Servers can and do go down without notice<p>EC2 instances are designed to be ephemeral. If you're worried that they are going down, you've probably built your app incorrectly. It isn't meant to be used in lieu of a dedicated server, and it shouldn't be used as such. That's not how their compute units are meant to be used.<p>* Can't run AWS on premise<p>They're selling compute time. I mean, sure, they <i>could</i> open source their stuff, but most of their infrastructure is based on open source utilities that you could replace easily. Do we call Dropbox a tyrant for not releasing their source? No. The 'ease of use' is their entire business model.<p>As to actually answering the question, I like Amazon. I use some of their services where it makes sense to, but I don't think they're the greatest thing ever. They certainly have a good set of utilities, but it doesn't fit every use case.<p>For small utilization / commodity web needs you've got your typical web hosts. Dreamhost, ASmallOrange, etc.<p>For slightly larger needs you've got VPSes. Linode, Slicehost, etc.<p>Slightly larger than that and you're in single dedicated server territory.<p>For data intensive or computation expensive needs, you've got Amazon.<p>Bigger than that, and you're on big hardware from (dating myself here) Sun or IBM (and possibly using S3 for storage, because it's bad ass.)