Computing compute resources for a startup vs Amazon

I liked it. I mostly agree too. I do think it was a glaring mistake to ignore the incredible deals you can get now on dedicated servers. Probably 95%+ web apps can do everything they need to do with 1-2 relatively lightweight machines with the 1-4TB monthly outgoing bandwidth that's included free with them.

The totally legitimate and efficient uses of EC2/S3 are few and far between. Mostly things like Justin.tv, where their peak load is so much higher than their average.

The best thing Amazon has done with EC2/S3 is give the architecture astronauts a datacenter-holodeck, where they can safely live out their fantasy scaling scenarios.

If your app does a lot of internal I/O to S3, it may be cheaper to run it on EC2.

That's a good logo.

Its actually a really cool product too. One of the few products i've seen on Techcrunch and actually started using regularly enough - just in time for the holidays. They seem like a smart bunch too.