17 karma · joined April 30, 2010
Balance is clearly the key.
To play devils advocate to your point though what about mysql, that's a downloadable product that makes it's money from commercial support or to a lesser extend tools like Phusion passenger. Most people don't pay for them for the thousands of Rails websites passenger hosts. However, for those larger enterprises it's much better to employ the experts for support.
The key is looking to see if you business fits exactly as you say.
Having tried the service it's currently clunky and command line based too! I wouldn't actually call these comparable products. SES seems more like it replaces transactional emails that users might have previously event sent without a lot of a anti-spam measures. The value that companies like Sendgrid/Mailchimp/Postmark add outweighs the price for me and, at least, in the short term I won't be moving anywhere.
The results actually show that visitors to sites run by site counters customers show that distribution not that the internet as a whole see's that distribution too don't they?
On a site that I run for developers I see less than 1% IE, on a site that a customer runs that deals with many big corporates it's mostly IE and IE 6 at that. Unfortunately I don't think we'll be seeing the death of older browsers any time soon but in some contexts it's OK not to support them.
The real skill in testing is knowing when it should be done and how. It's good article and ultimately until you have tested you can never know when it's write to make use of testing and TDD.