[karli]

As i said in the blogpost, we still love AWS, its awesome, we used it for many other projects and S3 is great in combination with EC2, but in some cases it makes sense to think about it, maybe it saves you something!

As i said, we really miss the simplicity of AWS, one mouse click and you have a loadbalancer, ec.

PS: trust me, AWS EBS volume can die, and this is a pain! :)

[jcastro]

I think the trick here is figuring out how much day-to-day workload you can host in a more traditional cost-effective way and how much elastic workload you can use EC2 for.

[vidarh]

Yes, the beauty of that is that if you can handle spikes with EC2 (or any other cloud provider) quickly, then you can load the servers that handle your base load much, much higher.

You might not even need to spawn EC2 images very often - many sites have daily variations that are too small for it to really be worth it. If your hosting is cheap, spawning EC2 images for more than 6-8 hours per day might already be ineffective compared to renting more servers on a monthly contract. But just having the ability might make the difference between aiming for a peak utilization of, say, 50% of your servers, in case of unusual peaks or server failures, and aiming for a peak utilization of 90%+.

That can make a huge difference in cost.

[karli]

Yes, thats exactly the trick! With our previous startup we spent around $60K/year for AWS :)