To be honest, I'm not much of an ops guy. So, I'm going with Hetzner dedicated servers. AWS is more difficult for me opswise than dedicated, and with dedicated

To be honest, I'm not much of an ops guy. So, I'm going with Hetzner dedicated servers. AWS is more difficult for me opswise than dedicated, and with dedicated I get all of the "let the people who know how to run data centers host your servers" service that EC2 gives you. AWS and traditional architectures are too much ops load, require too much specialized knowledge and have too many single points of failure. Plus if Amazon has terms you don't like (I personally won't do business with them given their treatment of wikileaks) your reliance on their protocols and services makes it non-trivial to migrate elsewhere... if you just use EC2 as bare machines, then there's no advantage to AWS over any other bare machine host (and a big cost disadvantage.) I'm building a cluster of distributed three-times-replicated data on top of Riak. Every node is a web server, dns server and database node. Round Robin DNS distributes the load, and if a node goes down, I don't have to even get out of bed... it can wait til morning, because nothing should break. (Of course this is what I'm building, I can't say it has performed in production yet, so this is theoretical...) I call this Nirvana. The only SPF I should have is if the whole datacenter goes offline-- this is a legitimate risk, and once I get large enough to handle that risk, I'll upgrade to Riak Enterprise and host in 2 data centers. I'm not certain I'm not missing anything, but I don't understand why I'm seemingly cutting new ground here-- this seems like the way everything should run. (and if you agree and are interested in Nirvana, follow me on twitter, I'll be open sourcing it as soon as I possibly can.)