Do I want to buy and manage servers myself? Would I pay for an additional computer to host my little toy Rails app? Will my ISP allow me to route network traffic to my personal IP with a standard plan? Most, at least that I've seen, prevent you from hosting.
For a little project something like the author of this article described, using virtual hosting is significantly easier (and more realistic). If you're going to run an enterprise operation, bringing that sort of hardware in house might make sense, but a lot of larger companies are still pushing that hosting out to places like Amazon as well.
Now, if you're asking why Amazon would allow (new) customers to scale up to $3000 worth of hosting overnight, maybe that's a separate issue. But how should Amazon judge that? There are probably users who want to jump straight up to that sort of scale. And evidently they did detect that the author didn't seem to fit that use case -- they actually called him about it pretty much right away.
Do I want to buy and manage servers myself? Would I pay for an additional computer to host my little toy Rails app? Will my ISP allow me to route network traffic to my personal IP with a standard plan? Most, at least that I've seen, prevent you from hosting.
For a little project something like the author of this article described, using virtual hosting is significantly easier (and more realistic). If you're going to run an enterprise operation, bringing that sort of hardware in house might make sense, but a lot of larger companies are still pushing that hosting out to places like Amazon as well.
Now, if you're asking why Amazon would allow (new) customers to scale up to $3000 worth of hosting overnight, maybe that's a separate issue. But how should Amazon judge that? There are probably users who want to jump straight up to that sort of scale. And evidently they did detect that the author didn't seem to fit that use case -- they actually called him about it pretty much right away.