For comparison, I moved a bunch of servers into a local datacentre a few months ago. It took us ~3 days to get a rack assigned, access arranged, and a couple of days to move and set up the physical servers for a single person. Fully loaded cost of the time spent was adds up to about $4k. Total leasing costs of the equipment (some of it has already been written off, but lets assume it was all new), rack cost, and 10Mbps CIR is about $1600/month for servers totalling about 80 x 2.4GHz cores, and ~20TB storage. Of course we need to factor in some maintenance cost, but the time cost for work spent managing the actual hardware as opposed to supporting the application environment, which we'd have to do regardless of hosting, adds a few hundred a month.
Comparing EC2 costs to what sounds like a completely botched project isn't very fair, in other words. Of course there are worse alternatives than EC2 as well.
Comparing EC2 costs to what sounds like a completely botched project isn't very fair, in other words. Of course there are worse alternatives than EC2 as well.