Thanks for sharing the experience. In your particular case it seems the right decision to move to a dedicated provider. The reasoning was similar to GitHub's (h

Thanks for sharing the experience. In your particular case it seems the right decision to move to a dedicated provider. The reasoning was similar to GitHub's (https://github.com/blog/493-github-is-moving-to-rackspace https://github.com/blog/493-github-is-moving-to-rackspace) Cloud environments make the most sense at either end of the spectrum. It works if you are Netflix, where the choice is not to purchase a few servers but build your own Cloud infrastructure (http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2011/08/i-come-to-use-clouds-not-to-build-them.html http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2011/08/i-come-to-use-clouds-not...) or if you are getting started, when you are cash-constrained and there are a lot of uncertainties, allows you to run quick experiments etc. Take our case, we provide a cloud hosting tool (http://bitnami.org/cloud http://bitnami.org/cloud) but we don't run all of our systems there, they are divided between "traditional" providers (one of them Softlayer) and AWS. It is a bit of a pain, but for our current requirements and budget, it works nicely.