I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but you pay the premium with EC2 for flexibility, not so much for raw computing power. If you don't need to be able to scale up AND down with regularity, EC2 is indeed a lot more expensive (since you're not considering the core advantage of EC2 in that case).

There are a ton of simple VPS providers that would probably get you closer to the baseline for computing costs, but to be fair, those providers are a completely different beast.