Amazon offers one nine of availability. I'm currently getting three on self-hosted equipment for a high-growth startup, with tens of thousands of concurrent us

Amazon offers one nine of availability. I'm currently getting three on self-hosted equipment for a high-growth startup, with tens of thousands of concurrent users getting sub-second response times. The key is having intelligent staff who have a deep understanding of your specific environment. This guy's argument completely discounts the value of that - he's essentially saying that using PHP over writing in C is better because the PHP devs know better than you do how to make stuff work. My experience with EC2 support staff is that they are mostly concerned with their generic setup and are of no use when anything falls outside of that, and they especially can't provide any help for your specific problems.