Do you have full control over the amount of data your system is taking in? The startup I founded had analytics code in a ton of iPhone applications and was han

Do you have full control over the amount of data your system is taking in? The startup I founded had analytics code in a ton of iPhone applications and was handling the load just fine right up until the day it suddenly wasn't. By that point we had customers who relied on us, and we had to deal with it very quickly. Not fun. And there's certainly more to scaling than just cheap architecture. We thought EC2 would handle the overflow until we unexpectedly became completely I/O bound. Firing up a few more instances can't fix that. If you're just running some scraper and can control what you're taking in, that's a completely different story.