The past several years have seen a rapid increase in the number and type of public cloud computing hardware configurations and pricing options offered to customers. In addition public cloud providers have also expanded the number and type of storage options and established incremental price points for storage and network transmission of outbound data from the cloud facility. This has greatly complicated the analysis to determine the most economical option for moving general purpose applications to the cloud. This paper investigates whether this economic analysis for moving general purpose applications to the public cloud can be extended to more computationally intensive HPC type computations. Using an HPC baseline hardware configuration for comparison, the total cost of operations for several HPC private and public cloud providers are analyzed. The analysis shows under what operational conditions the public cloud option may be a more cost effective alternative for HPC type applications.