It's not really about cost, although that's part of it. I didn't mention it in my original question, but I also need quite a bit more performance than I'm gett

It's not really about cost, although that's part of it. I didn't mention it in my original question, but I also need quite a bit more performance than I'm getting with EC2. It's about getting an order of magnitude more CPU ( Quad ore at 3 Ghz rather than single compute instance on EC2, which is spec'd at a single core 1.0 to 1.2 Ghz Opteron or Xeon from 2007. Ref: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_is_an_EC2_Compute_Unit_and_why_did_you_introduce_it http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_is_an_EC2_Compute_Unit_.... I need the extra CPU for what I'm doing. But, the killer feature for me is about getting several orders of magnitude better on disk IO by using SSD's. I'm doing a ton of relational queries for my site, and the IO speeds on EC2 are killing me. Linode or Rackspace Cloud might be a bit faster than EC2, but the speed differential between SSD's and rotating disk is huge. Running my datastore off of SSD's rather than spinning disks allows me to stick with postgres as my db. While sexy and quite fun, I'm very leery of choosing a NoSQL solution. I really don't want to spend the extra development time bolting the relational features I need onto a non-relational database. So, while it might take me time maintaining the server, it's going to save me a crap load of time.