Amazon S3 is awesome and different from intrastructure in the cloud. If you choose to use S3 and a lot of your servers rely on fast access to it, then using EC2

Amazon S3 is awesome and different from intrastructure in the cloud. If you choose to use S3 and a lot of your servers rely on fast access to it, then using EC2 too can often make sense. Rackspace offers a good compromise where they have cloud services like Cloud Files and Cloud Servers, but you can also have dedicated servers with fast access to your cloud stuff. As others have mentioned, it’s a lot easier to achieve geographical diversity with a cloud provider like AWS. Another thing to keep in mind with the AWS cloud: if you have a huge setup, you can always start the largest instances, and you will almost certainly have the physical server all for yourself. And for a fee of $10 per hour per region, across _all_ your instances, you can have totally dedicated instances where you’re guaranteed that none of your instances will be on shared hardware. ($7,200 per region per month sounds like a lot, but it is a fixed fee and a drop in the bucket for people with huge EC2 deployments.)