While the cloud does enable you to scale your resources on demand, you still have to address the same issues I had to deal with (how to efficiently use those resources). Plus, moving to a mutli-server setup involves additional complexity in the architecture of the system, which I'd rather not mess with unless I have to :)

Multi-server? Nope, single. Same as you have now, just with added flexibility on ram with 2 clicks I can handle a huge server load with ease, then drop back when done. That way I don't waste time on low level optimization tasks and can keep to what I do best. Building things.

Seriously, there's no reason to stay on a traditional style server setup and you'll never go back once you've tried it. It can be pricey once you ramp up, but give it a shot as you can literally pay by the hour while you play.

Hmm, didn't know you could throw ram at it without adding servers/bouncing the box. Very cool :)

Still, I think there's value in figuring out this stuff by investigating efficiency gains. If I was having to do real tricky stuff (which would probably be beyond my expertise) then the cloud would make more sense for me.

which service are you on that increases ram without taking the box down?

-8 in downvotes with no explanation? really guys? Sorry for trying to help, i'm out.

I was on EC2+apache+wordpress+mysql and had my blog go down as well after being featured on HN. In my case, simply rebooting the cloud instance fixed the problem (I had lots of other old projects running on the same instance). However, I did do some research into figuring out what I could have done as my blog kept getting more traffic ... had I used RDS, I could have gone to a bigger instance with little downtime. Unfortunately, my understanding is that there would be no way to go back down to a smaller RDS instance.

P.S. I upvoted you. I also don't get why people downvoted you.

I also upvoted you for the helpful post. However, you aren't supposed to use caps for emphasis on HN. That could be the reason.

It's probably not what you said, but how you said it. It's tone is more confrontational than informative - and that's really just the first few words.

Low-level optimization can be fun though. If you always have the convenience of "throwing hardware" at the solution, you may not be forced into learning something cool, like nginx or properly configuring caching.

I saw your message about downvotes. sorry that's the case. you still didn't explain which service you're using though. I really want to know! :(