I'm curious to know why he chose the company he did among all the companies he looked at. I agree with the concerns about the difficulty of sourcing these serv

I'm curious to know why he chose the company he did among all the companies he looked at. I agree with the concerns about the difficulty of sourcing these services, and this may be a large part of why AWS is successful-- they provide the service as a utility. One of the cheaper companies on his spreadsheet is hetzner.de They have dedicated servers that go down in size to about $20 a month: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x2 http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x2 Note that their price includes VAT. If you're not a EU company, you don't pay the VAT and so the actual price is cheaper. For our needs, we're going to start off buying a cluster. Probably 4-5 machines. As load grows, we'll add nodes and larger nodes over time. (A nice feature of Riak is that you can do this, just give the ring time to rebalance and you can migrate from one set of hosts to a larger one relatively quickly.) VPS offerings lose a lot of their appeal in the face of a $20/month 1GB dedicated server! And with no setup cost, it is pretty elastic, though as you get to larger dedicated servers hetzner has a setup cost. I'm not shilling for hetzner, I am just sharing them because I'm considering being a customer and and curious as to what others think about them. Also, curious if anyone else is facing the "we need to start with a cluster of machines, but we're a tiny startup at this point" issue...