Utility computing is going to cost you..

A quick browse of Web Hosting Talk's dedicated hosting offers forum, and you'll see that you can lease a nicely configured Intel Core Duo server, 1GB ram and 160GB of disk space on a dedicated unmetered 10MBit/sec link for around $130. Thats full duplex too, so about 3255 GB of transfer in each direction a month. Assuming we're not taxing the server too much, lets assume 20% CPU utilization. Plugging this same data into a utility computing service such as Amazon's S3/EC2, we end up with a bill over $590!! Prior to June 2007, it would have been almost $1000. So I could double up at the same data center ($260), and put two servers at another data center in Europe ($200), and still be UNDER the cost of an Amazon EC2 service by over $100. Not to mention that I've also got 4x the capacity. So this model really only makes sense if you can't administer your own server and like to throw away money!!