I use AWS, and will continue to use AWS, because it means less screwing around with stupid things and more time making important things work.

Since you're writing to multiple EBS volumes for the RAID 1 portion of the RAID 10, you're going to require more EC2 to EBS bandwidth.

EBS volumes are replicated across multiple servers, so you don't necessarily need the reliability, especially if you're replicating the data elsewhere.

YMMV, of course, and everyone has different priorities and different levels of what constitutes acceptable risk, but RAID 0 with EBS isn't quite the data death wish it is with physical hardware.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/raid-conf...

No, it's not. It is if you want data-at-rest storage, but I don't care about that when I have multi-master MySQL and Postgres running on instance stores. Or when I have replicative NoSQL databases (Riak is more than happy running forever in instance stores and duping across AZs).

Having said that, nothing beats getting real hardware in terms of performance/$. I used to work for a company that exclusively worked on SoftLayer's hardware servers. These were $500+/month each, but they were fast. The point is that if you can devote a dual octocore machine to what you are doing, and are willing to pass up on the SAN, flexible networking, etc. then you get a very fast box. If what you are doing requires lots of very fast hardware, then yea AWS or anything like it is not really for you. But if you are like most people, your AWS bill is not going to break the bank and you can just spend one less billable hour figuring out why the server is slow, and just double its size.