I would be very interested in knowing what factors you are trading off for "equivalent" other than "on-demand". Many of my friends use co-location services for their businesses, and most of them purchase only on price, and their servers honestly suck: they have high latency, they are unstable, they don't have remote serial console access... they are living in a ghetto that burns tons of their time into "becoming server people".

If you find a company that has reasonable support, reliable servers, good datacenters, and the minimal features required to debug issues remotely, then you are looking at prices fairly equivalent to those offered by EC2 heavy-utilization reserved instances (and are going to end up with a similar contract length anyway). If this somehow doesn't work out: call Amazon AWS's sales division and see if you are compelling enough for them to negotiate with (they totally have a sales division, and they really do "want your business").

Regardless, your choice of quote is really bothersome: "people like to claim" that EC2 is as expensive as their on-demand list prices, and that's a fact clearly demonstrable by the person I'm responding to (who is quite clearly and obviously claiming EC2 is more expensive than it really is) and one that is not defensible as the price you should be looking at is the heavy-utilization reserved pricing; if you'd like to respond to my comment "and is in fact quite price competitive" then you should quote that and adjust your argument appropriately.

Honestly, the history of HN is not much better (as I scour around trying to find the "numbers" you claim "have been recited countless times"). It is actually difficult to find people who don't claim that Amazon EC2 is more expensive than it is; I'm almost wondering if you and I are living on different versions of the site...

"EC2 is about 10-20 times more expensive than dedicated hosting. Even if reserved instances save us 22% over 3 years, it still doesn't even come close." -- cmer

^ No, EC2 reserved instances save you 71% over 3 years.

"It costs $576/mo to run an extra large EC2 instance fulltime" -- stephenjudkins

^ No, even two years ago (before "heavy utilization reserved instances") you could drop this price by 66% to $195.84/mo.

"With EC2 prices at about $0.10 per hour, I can't imagine ever using a service with such a high premium." -- apinstein

^ Obviously: no, but the fact that this person is angry about the price of a small instance at $72/mo is quite telling; he isn't willing to go lower than $20/mo.

I found a price comparison by vladd from earlier this year, comparing a high-end VPS to EC2's largest offering, coming up with a nearly 10x difference, but the server is entirely useless: it is a consumer-level product running non-ECC RAM. Later comments claim the same hosting company has "competitively priced servers with ECC ram".

A couple months ago I found a thread that linked to a fairly detailed argument[1] stating that EC2 instances are 2-3x more expensive than a VPS. However, this person again is performing a comparison with non-ECC hardware. What damns this comparison, however, is that he is not taking advantage of 3-year reserved instances for a long-term high-end use case: his numbers seem to be based on 49% off, when he can easily get 71% off, nearly a 2x difference. <- Again, EC2 is cheaper than people like to claim.

[1] http://codemonkeyism.com/dark-side-virtualized-servers-cloud...

Seriously: I can't find anyone who is actually doing legitimate comparisons of Amazon's offerings. People either compare EC2 to "I spent a week of time negotiating a deal to take over a bunch of hardware from a failing company down the street" (which, for the record, will also give you a great deal on chairs and office furniture: comparing the cloud to a fire sale is inane), assume "a server is a server is a server" and find "the cheapest" option (which seems to always have unreliable RAM), or (frankly: "and") fail to take into account Amazon's reserved instance discounts.

That said, Hacker News has a really horrible search system, and I'm trying to find something kind of esoteric (as I want to search for a dollar sign, and thereby have to use proxies such as "expensive" and "cost"). I would thereby love to see an honest comparison, and am happily willing to believe that I missed it: do you have a link to such?