Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price. This has always been my problem with AWS. Cost savings might make sense for someone who actually needs 200 servers but if I just want one I'm paying 10 times as much for half as much in terms of performance. It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance…
> It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance is more than twice as slow than a $10/mo 'traditional' VPS instance. Elastic compute of the type provided by EC2 and similar services (Google Compute Engine, etc.) is a fundamentally different service than simple VPS. AWS has something that is, or is very close to, a simple VPS in LightSail, and the pricing is pretty competitive with other VPS providers. LightSail…
What is the fundamental difference that you speak of?
At least to me, the only major difference is that while AWS markets their VMs as EC2 because they were designed for elasticity (i.e variable compute workloads), which explains the elastic in the name EC2; VPS providers OTOH market their VMs as a cheaper alternative to dedicated servers (i.e. fixed compute workloads).
The difference in pricing largely follows from the difference in design since the cloud shines when your resource needs are elastic. VPSes shine when your resource needs are largely inelastic.