bjinwright

This can't be right there are 7 colleges in Greensboro, NC and they are ranked 106.

You should add DigitalOcean

This is very similar to github.com/capless/envs.

Looks cool but now I have to rename my project. I was going to use the cappy namespace on PyPi.

It depends on what framework if any you choose to serve websites with. If you something like Chalice or Serverless then yes you are stuck with Lambda. But you use something like Zappa (https://github.com/miserlou/Zappa) that is basically converts API Gateway's request object to one that is WSGI compatible then you can take your app and skip down the road if you get ticked off with Lambda. The Heroku comparison one isn't a fair one either. The waya you pay for Heroku dynos is very similar how you pay for EC2 or any other VM. You are billed by the microsecond that part is very important and while technically you have a 100 req/s limit to start with it is a soft limit if you ask to have it removed. It is probably more useful to compare it to Google App Engine but even that isn't fair.

I will +1 for Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.

There is also Lean Analytics (http://leananalyticsbook.com/), The Lean Startup, and my personal favorite Rework by 37 Signals.

I'm going to make a couple of assumptions and if I'm wrong just ignore the answer. I'm assuming you are using either PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, or .Net. I'm assuming these are either web servers, worker servers, caching servers, or database servers.

With those assumptions made I'm going to suggest some services to use. I don't work for ANY of these companies. I run a small startup that uses most of these companies.

For web servers I would recommend using AWS' Elastic Beanstalk. You don't pay anything extra to use this service in addition to the EC2 servers you are using now. If you use reserved instances it is also cheaper than pretty much any other PaaS out there (Google App Engine gives it a good run for the money). Recently I did a spreadsheet outlining the savings http://goo.gl/AL5Cj. The spreadsheet was done before the most recent AWS price reductions so the m1.small prices aren't right.

For worker servers I recommend using PiCloud. You can install anything you want and they only charge you for the time your jobs use. Granted you have to use Python to interface with jobs but does that really matter in the grand scheme. I personally use Python anyways so its a bonus. Depending on the job it might be more appropriate to use AWS' Elastic MapReduce offering.

For database servers I recommend using either RDS or Xeround (http://www.xeround.com) a MySQL provider if you have to use a relational database. If you have the luxury of using a NoSQL option then use Cloudant (http://www.cloudant.com) a CouchDB DBaaS company or AWS' DynamoDB server.

For caching servers use AWS' Elasticache service or Garantia Data's (http://www.garantiadata.com) Memcached or Redis cloud.