Have used ec2 and s3 for a while now in a production context. While there may be cheaper services out there, we've appreciated the ability to scale up and down

Have used ec2 and s3 for a while now in a production context. While there may be cheaper services out there, we've appreciated the ability to scale up and down rapidly, build test environments, etc. It really depends on where you are at in the cycle of a project. If you are running MySQL, and want high availability, you likely want replication, which means multiple instances no matter what provider you choose. With replication, the fact that your disk is transient isn't as big of a deal. The way I look at AWS is that it nudges you in the right direction as far as building reliable, scalable systems. As far as EBS, another thing to think about is instance types. Since EBS is essentially network attached storage (I believe), network IO greatly affects performance. Small instances don't have particularly great io. Thus, I prefer to run off the transient disk right now over EBS. If we went to larger instance types, which have better network io, that might swing the pendulum.