Im talking 3 figures because thats what I assume most startups need for their twitter/facebook/whatever app. It only becomes even more ridiculously expensive to stay with EC2 once you get bigger. You cant just say "well, once you are big its better!" Its not. Once you get bigger, the downfalls of relying on ec2 (for anything besides overflow) are even worse. The more servers you have and the more bandwidth you do, the more cash you throw out the window.
In fact as you get bigger you would be irresponsible to your shareholders to rely on amazon and not hire your own engineer. You know why? Its cheaper to have your own engineer and manage xx servers on colo then it is to have amazon. Not to mention you will still need a server guy once you get to that size anyways. Theres a reason you dont find any sites in the top 100 running their businesses entirely off of amazon. Its not financially prudent. Its a easy way out and not the /right/ way out.
Also, we are not talking about s3, simple DB or CDS, so stop bringing that up. We are talking about EC2. You dont get to say that EC2 is awesome because S3 exists. They are separate products.
I said multiple times that 1-3 server shops are irrelevant for this discussion. At that scale you can use anything and it simply doesn't matter either way.
Since you seem to have mild reading comprehension issues I will spell that out for you: Neither will a profitable business break a sweat over paying 500 more or less on hosting. Nor do many of the benefits of EC2 come into play at such a small scale.
So either throw out some stats and numbers or stop bullshitting people. There are enough people blindly drinking the cloud hosting koolaid without the fake facts.
I don't like your tone. I explained four possible use-cases in my last comment, I don't think I used "fake facts" anywhere. If you are immune to basic math then that's your problem, no need to get personal.
Its cheaper to have your own engineer and manage xx servers on colo then it is to have amazon.
I conclude that you simply have no idea what you're talking about, much less about the figures involved. Furthermore an EC2 instance apparently killed your pet dog at some point in the past, which now prevents you from any rational thought in that direction.
Thanks for pointing that out, my bad. Edited it as to not collect karma for false figures. I stand by my point, be it $140 more or less.
Also, Im not talking about single server setups only. Show me a scenario where its cheaper to run your entire business on EC2 than a mix of Dedicated + EC2.
Please see my first comment in this discussion where I said exactly that. It's exactly this mix which makes the most sense in most cases.
Also, Im not talking about single server setups only. Show me a scenario where its cheaper to run your entire business on EC2 than a mix of Dedicated + EC2.
I never claimed that - but yes, even those scenarios exist.
If your business is number crunching then EC2 might be a good deal. Likewise if your business is strongly saisonal (e.g. ticket sales for sports events or such).
Moreover there are many scenarios where EC2 enables things you could not realistically afford otherwise; do you think dropbox could have realized their storage and scalability needs on conventional hardware?
While traffic might be "ridiculously" expensive on AWS, storage happens to be riciculously cheap. You don't get $.10/GB "infinitely" scalable random access storage elsewhere.
And finally, closer to your usual PHP/MySQL shop, in many companies the savings due to flexibility and availability simply outweigh the markup on the hosting bill.
You keep throwing figures in the 3 digit range. Sorry man, but your admins burn that per hour while they reinvent all the little infrastructure things that amazon already has.
Trust me, not all of amazon's customers running those 1mio-or-something instances are idiots.