Nice post. I agree to many of the upsides of using AWS or for that matter any other webservice, but down side is that, cutting over to your own scaled system la

Nice post. I agree to many of the upsides of using AWS or for that matter any other webservice, but down side is that, cutting over to your own scaled system later would be difficult. Also, when a system scales there is a lot of money saved by efficient engineering (initially costly though). Paying per-use fee is not economically scalable as it adds significantly to the Opex. Keep in mind that the best monetization vehicle for most Web2.0 technologies is online advertising; which pays per access and is little, so such a per-use Opex will never let the profits scale. For early-startup and prototyping AWS is definitely a good option.