AWS or dedicated server?
tdavis: I've been setting up dedicated machines for years and looked into switching to AWS for TicketStumbler. I determined that it was actually considerably more expensive to obtain the same amount of resources (i.e. cpu/ram) on AWS because the pricing scheme doesn't lend itself well to having many always-on images.In the end I chose to run Xen on top of dedicated hardware, which has essentially bought us the best of both worlds: simple scaling and low costs. Granted, it would probably take me a couple hours to start up a dozen more VMs (I'd need to requisition new hardware) as opposed to a few minutes and S3 is still cheap for mass storage, but neither of these points had any relevance to our situation.As mentioned by others, it all comes down to what your project needs.