I think that a mixed setup like you describe can allow you to get the best of both worlds, if all your servers don't need to be in the same place for latency re

I think that a mixed setup like you describe can allow you to get the best of both worlds, if all your servers don't need to be in the same place for latency reasons. "the cloud" is also awesome for backups. you can have a full backup cold spare system, test it once a week, and pay almost nothing for it. (this is what those 'micro' instances are for. you have a micro instance updating your DB on an EBS backend. when it comes time to fail over, shut down the micro instance and bring up the ebs mount on something beefy.) my point was just that most systems are on most of the time, and for those systems, owning saves you a lot of money over using "the cloud"