Of course, that doesn't include storage and bandwidth.
I mean, sure. I've got a 5 year old laptop that will outperform the t2.micro I'm pay $8.35/month for. But I don't trust my home internet to be stable or fast enough. Not to mention that my primary usage is an IRC bouncer, so I need it to not be on my home internet connection so some script kiddie doesn't DDoS me after I ban them from a channel because they were spamming racial slurs. Yes, that has actually happened.
I average probably a single 5 minute hiccup each month. That's 99.988% uptime. For someone wanting to run their WoW guild's voice chat server, or just a toy server, or a development/staging environment, that's plenty.
But I mean, my home internet is only 35 mbps anyways via Frontier FIOS. I can get 150 mbps through Comcast, but I refuse to give that company a penny of my money. In either case, I'm not going to be running any major production servers at home anyways.
Now I would not host my main customer site there. But dev servers? Beta servers? QA servers? Hey why not.. save some massive bills.
used ThinkPad W540 with same config goes for ~1.5 months of your AWS rent.
Laptops are surprisingly good as little dev servers. In fact, you can find ones with broken screens for even cheaper, which is fantastic!
Few hundred bucks can get you a nice i5 or i7 processor
