From a cost standpoint, deploying in a cloud infrastructure such as AWS usually ends up being a lot cheaper than buying your own hardware. If you want to deploy your own hardware, you have to pay upfront for all the hardware mentioned previously (servers, network equipment, and so on) and sometimes for licensed software as well. In a cloud environment, you pay as you go. You can add or remove servers in no time and will only be charged for the duration that the servers have been running. Also, if you take advantage of PaaS and SaaS applications, you usually end up saving even more money by lowering your operating costs as you don't need as many staff to administrate your database, storage, and so on. Most cloud providers, AWS included, also offer tiered pricing and volume discounts. As your service gets bigger and bigger, you end up paying less for each unit of storage, bandwidth, and so on.