Also puzzled about this too, since the pricing scheme differs from a per/usage AWS fee. Maybe they're going the way of traditional shared hosting companies by banking on a very small percentage of their users actually ever achieving high traffic?

Following up here... "starting at 19 /mo" ... and then the lowest cost plan is $29/mo. Just sayin'.

They're pulling the same skeezy trick that one of my local web/email hosting competitors pulls -- and for which I teased them publicly in our latest advertising.

You only get the advertised rate if you pay the full year in advance. This allows them to advertise a "monthly" rate that is actually "$holycow/12" while also advertising "no commitments!"

edit: and, at 613M of RAM ... I'm not sure exactly what someone would plan to do with such an instance of Windows, but it won't be much.

The pricing and specs compared with a dedicated server from Hetzner.de running windows server 2008 web are absolutely mad

I thought the same thing when I went to the website, though it looks like it simplifies things a bit, particularly in regards to billing. Might be good to have the advantages on an FAQ page somewhere.