1. Small instances on EC2 are really slow. Really, really slow. You get much more value with the medium instances. 2. Use a HTTP cache (e.g. Varnish) in front

1. Small instances on EC2 are really slow. Really, really slow. You get much more value with the medium instances. 2. Use a HTTP cache (e.g. Varnish) in front of your app. Even though you are using memcached, every request is still (I assume) hitting your application. With a proper cache, your application layer would only be hit when the cache expires.