My business partner and I ran a website (rubylane.com) for many years, just the 2 of us, colocated at he.net. With good hardware (we used Supermicro servers bo

My business partner and I ran a website (rubylane.com) for many years, just the 2 of us, colocated at he.net. With good hardware (we used Supermicro servers bought from acme.com), it's not a big deal. We mirrored every disk drive with hardware raid1, had all the servers connected in a loop via their serial ports, had the consoles redirected to the serial ports, and it was not much of a hassle. When we were first starting, we used cheap hardware and that caused us some pain. The other very useful thing we had setup is virtual IP addresses for all of the services: search engine, database, www server, image server, etc. The few times we ever had trouble with the site or needed to take a machine out of service, we could redirect its services to another machine with fakeip. Recently I bought an old SuperMicro server on eBay, configured it with 2 6-way AMD Opterons, 3 8-way SATA controllers, and 32GB of memory. With 4TB 5700RPM drives in an 8-way software RAID6, it could do 800MB/sec. I realize it's not small file random I/O, but a blended configuration where you put small files on SSD and large files on spinning disk would probably be pretty sweet. My intuition is that learning all the ins-and-outs of AWS, and how to react and handle all kinds of situations, is not that much easier than learning how to react with your own hardware when problems come up. Especially consider that AWS is constantly changing things and it's out of your control, whereas with your own hardware, you get to decide when things change. If you can colocate physically close, it's a lot easier. Our colocation was in Fremont but our office was in San Fran, so it was a haul if we had to install or upgrade equipment. But even so, there was only 1 or 2 times in 7 years that we needed to spend 2 consecutive days at the colo. One of those was during a major upgrade where it turned out that the (cheap) hardware we bought was faulty.