There is sentiment that Reddit's developers are too quick to adopt the latest me-too web technology which overall doesn't benefit them. So I think what he's implying is that it's money wasted on EC2 when a traditional server would be more cost effective. I tend to agree.
In the last thread they said that they are spending over 250.000$ a year just in servers. They could save huge amounts of money if they would just switch to rented servers.
Amazon EC2 is very cheap if you want to use a server for a few hours. However if you want a server for 1 year, then it's cheaper to buy a 1 year lease (i.e. your own server) than it is to rent it by the hour./
