Survive the digg effect with Amazon Web Services

For some reason this article sounds fishy to me. I can't put my finger on it exactly, though this paragraph caught my attention:

quoting from the article:

> Using AWS isn't for the faint of heart. You need to have a very good understanding of Unix, you need to be able to install a Java runtime environment on your local computer in order to use the Amazon command line tools and you need to do a good amount of reading in order to get things initially setup.

Reading this carefully, it just doesn't add up. Installing a JVM is a null operation on os x and solaris, virtually painless on windows, a minor and rapidly shrinking annoyance on linux, and for now indeed a pretty major step on freeBSD. In other words, in the vast majority of circumstances, it's simple. Hardly "not for the faint of heart". The other point, the ability to manage unix, is something you pretty much need -anyway- if you're going to go with the only reasonable alternative (host your own or use virtual dedicated hosting). I guess you could theorize that managing a windows box is easier for certain individuals, but unless you're using ASP on IIS, windows isn't really easier to maintain. This sentence almost seems like its designed to convince the casual reader using a rhetoric trick.

The other thing I don't really get about S3/EC2, though probably I just misunderstand the amazon services, is this:

When your userbase is small, you don't need it - it's just needless complication. If your userbase grows, in almost all cases, you'll want to be able to tell a potential suitor that your website isn't intricately bound with a service operated by the competition.

Did I miss something?

Good introduction.

I've been using S3 to host media files for the last several months, on a small scale, and have found it to be reliable and surprisingly inexpensive.

The simple setup, and ability to forward subdomains to S3 buckets, is a great combination.