Playing around with the calculator, you're roughly on track with an r3.x4large - most of the Linux options happily bundle far less RAM.

Getting 9TB of EBS on top of that puts the bill at $1516 per month. None of that accounts for traffic, of which we know nothing about.

The thing is in an Amazon world, you could optimise the setup for an Amazon deployment. For example, you'd probably move parts of that data, like database snapshots, onto S3.

Those costs are still nothing to sneeze at, and very likely suboptimal.

3 months ago traffic was about 3 million page views per day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11315525

It just goes to show that cloud prices are somewhat of a ripoff if you have the knowhow to use CDNs and setup a single server in a colocation center. That machine can be built for less than 5k.

Of course -- if you know your traffic well ahead of time. If you start growing quickly, it's not quite as simple. (And if you don't have the traffic/growth anticipated, you wasted a bunch of money).

You also aren't accounting for redundancy. If the machine totally blows up, how quickly can you build another? Or do you spend +5k to have a second sitting as a standby? If the hardware does fail (whether it's a single drive in RAID or the whole system), who fixes it (or deals with getting it fixed)? For that matter, is the person who built or sourced the hardware's time worth $0?

Cloud IS more expensive, but it's not as simple as comparing to the up-front cost of one piece of hardware.

This is true but cloud can still be a redundancy mechanism for a colocated server.

With EBS you can't just match size, since the IOPS and latency matter far more.