S3/Cloudfront: I use these for static file (images, CSS, Javascript, etc). A current project I'm working on requires serving tens of thousands of images, so ra

S3/Cloudfront: I use these for static file (images, CSS, Javascript, etc). A current project I'm working on requires serving tens of thousands of images, so rather than having to deal with storing these myself, dealing with backups, etc. Cloudfront also serves these from edge locations closer to users for better performance. EC2/EBS/ELB/RDS: My projects are too big for shared hosting, too small to buy a cluster of servers. EC2 is the best option for "in-between" projects. I can scale vertically or horizontally very easily. Elastic load balancing makes this very easy...just clone a new server from a storeed EBS snapshot and add it to the load balancer. I write my apps to point to a common RDS database instance (soon to be upgraded to support read replicas). I'm a developer, not a sys admin, so I use the AWS Management Console most of the time. That makes it really easy to add/remove servers, create new S3 buckets, etc.