My application had (still would have) very high CPU requirements, and 2k/month would have got me spending more money than necessary. When I started I bought 1 server with the capacity I needed and put that in co-lo for $75 a month. That little puppie was equal to $10K a month at AWS, so why would I want to use AWS again? Just do the math, even 1 server out performs and is exponentially less expensive. The cloud has the majority of engineers looking like morons from a financial literacy perspective.