AWS is great. We use it a work and I spun up extra server capacity for a once a year open studios event. That being said as someone who's been in the Unix wor

AWS is great. We use it a work and I spun up extra server capacity for a once a year open studios event. That being said as someone who's been in the Unix world for a while figuring out which AWS services to use is not obvious at all. It took me some time to figure out the alphabet soup of sevices and I was familiar from work. I ended up using "cloud formation" which builds you a server (LAMP or other) and optional database/loadbalances configuration. Its was that or selecting a LAMP ami (Amazon machine image). They have a lot of documentation but its hard to get an overview of what everything is (S3, elastic storage....) Plus configuring web server/ database servers for best performance can be non-trivial. I get better speeds from our organizations cheap "shared hosting", during low loads. I was pretty sure the one week of very high loads would have crushed the shared host, thus AWS was perfect.