Sure, RDS reduces the operational overhead and I love it for that, but you make tradeoffs to gain those benefits. For a lot of businesses they may not matter, but in your case they sounded pretty severe.

I think you might be confusing me with someone else, but I agree that there are tradeoffs.

I think RDS is great until the needs are extreme enough to require a full-time sysadmin or DBA. Nowadays, though, that means you're dealing with quite a lot of traffic (or just an edge case in terms of your read/write ratios or latency requirements).

Oops, you're right, I thought I was still talking with dankohn1.