Its actually very easy to beat the price/performance of ec2 using real hardware. The draw of ec2/aws is in the "everything is a monthly charge and an api call away" operational instant gratification. If you need to auto-scale by the hour there's few other places you can do it. If you can generally capacity-manage your setup a month or more into the future, then a 1-week latency on RunInstances isn't actually a problem.