That's exactly backwards. Amazon are expensive; they're fighting on features, not price.

That's an odd way to restate what the original poster said. Your argument appears to be the tautology that AWS is expensive when compared to different services which do less.

First, that's not a tautology. Second, that's not my point. The OP is wrong in saying that Amazon are being price-competitive. That's not their strategy; you can see it by comparing their VM costs to just about anyone else out there. Amazon's strategy is to out-feature everyone and lock customers in precisely so that they don't have to compete on price.

It is the definition of a tautology: you're both saying the same thing but from different directions. AWS is trying to avoid room for equivalent services, not services which do less: they don't want a customer who's sensitive to $2/month but they do want people to say “ops is expensive, let's save our people for non-commodity jobs”

Also, those cost comparisons almost universally compare spot pricing rather than reserved. If you run the numbers seriously AWS is not the bargain basement leader but it's a lot more even than the contrarian blog echo chamber would have you believe, particularly if you have bursty workloads, use some of their other offerings and/or need servers outside of the US/Europe.

Except for the part where I can fire up a $19.95/month Linode instance for running MySQL, sure.

The advantage of Amazon is not cost, it's flexibility and ease-of-use. Questionable ease-of-use at that, given how horrid their web UI is.

The vendor lock-in is concerning as well (not for RDS, more for other things).