EC2 is pretty complicated. You really have to restructure the way you work your app to make it scale well with EC2. You can usually get a lot of scalability out

EC2 is pretty complicated. You really have to restructure the way you work your app to make it scale well with EC2. You can usually get a lot of scalability out of a normal web app without going that far. Start "top". Is MySQL using a lot of CPU? If so, get a second dedicated server at the same data center and put your MySQL on that. Next, look at the MySQL top queries and figure out what you can cache out of the equation with memcache.