Indeed. In my experience, even if you don't use any other cloud service, do yourself a favour, and use S3 + Cloudfront (or equivalent) for static / uploaded fil

Indeed. In my experience, even if you don't use any other cloud service, do yourself a favour, and use S3 + Cloudfront (or equivalent) for static / uploaded files. Then, if and when you need to scale your web tier horizontally, you've solved what probably would have been your main blocker. Plus, as mentioned, there's your backups sorted. Plus, you'll never have to worry about running out of disk space. Plus, you're taking load off your web tier, for something it really doesn't need to handle itself. Plus, massive performance boost on serving those assets over a CDN. Plus, it's really cheap, most likely a fraction of the cost of your VPS(es) or dedicated box(es).