Why cloud computing?
rmoriz: Let's look outside the USA:Here in Germany, hosting is rediclious cheap. You get decent quad core boxes with 12GB RAM for about 70EUR (~100$) including 2-3TB of traffic.Compared to ec2 it's reeeealy cheap and located in the middle of continental europe. The Dublin/Ireland location of EC2 has a much higher latency and is more expensive than the US instances.So most startups [1] rent a lot of those cheap boxes in Germany, doing a loadbalancing/failover setup in front of it. done. If you need more hardware: It usually takes <24hrs to get a new box. So just order 1-2 more than you currently need as backup for scaling and faults.[1] I analyzed that from the most popular hosting provider of http://IsItRails.com