I don't disagree with your point per se as I do love working with physical gear, but I do think you're grossly missing the point in places: > "My take: a singl

I don't disagree with your point per se as I do love working with physical gear, but I do think you're grossly missing the point in places: > "My take: a single machine (or two for HA) will be enough" 2 bare metal instances isn't HA. Not even close. > "if you really want to go big separate the web server from the database but that's it." I would always recommend separating the web server from the database server on anything professional. It gives an easy clear path for scaling sideways (since you've already separated out your back end from your application), it allows you to tighten security (eg only allow access to the DB server from the web servers via the unprivileged DB user connection), it also makes maintenance easier. Even if you're only running on one physical box, put the web server and DB in their own VM or LXC/Zone/Jail container. > The other day I saw quad E7-4870 (yeah won't win any single thread contest but has 40 cores and 80 threads) 512GB RAM servers for $299 a month, with 1TB RAM for $499. Had a low end 2TB SSD for boot and you could add 8x1TB HDD w/ HW RAID for $40... I work with both bare metal servers matching your description and both self-hosted and private clouds. Frankly I think your rant misses one of the most important point of working with AWS and that's the convenience and redundancy that the tooling offers. AWS isn't just about single instances, it's about having redundant availability zones with redundant networking hardware and about being able to have disaster recovery zones in whole other data centres and having all of the above work automatically. Getting our self hosted stuff to even close the level of tooling that AWS offers took months of man hours and quite a considerable more initial set up costs. Having to buy at least two of every piece of kit for redundancy, having to have BT lay two dedicated internet links (we have 3 now) just incase a builder accidentally cuts one of our lines and having core infrastructure replicated off site all adds considerably to both the set up time and cost. So yeah, for small businesses and personal blogs AWS is a bit overkill. But you cannot use the "high availability" argument and say "2 physical machines is enough". Disclaimer: I've worked for clients such as Sony, UEFA and News International as well as many smaller but still sizable national publications. Our infrastructure has consisted of both scaled up physical hardware and scaled sideways virtual machines and frankly I/we wouldn't be able to offer the kinds of services we do nor with the kind of uptime we do without running a fleet of virtualized web servers.