You're absolutely correct in that the documentation and tutorials are thorough and the support is outstanding (I've been helped before and am convinced of the q

You're absolutely correct in that the documentation and tutorials are thorough and the support is outstanding (I've been helped before and am convinced of the quality of people doing support for AWS). I made that comment from the viewpoint of a programmer and business owner with the most surface-level sysadmin knowledge, who doesn't have the time to attend AWS conferences or read through hundreds of pages of documentation. I'm not asking Amazon to "dumb down" their documentation or tutorials, I just wish that there was somewhere that Amazon could succinctly state the best way of doing things. This could take the form of a novice guide, as the other commenter stated, or as links in the documentation to articles in the blogosphere that detail practical ways to get set up with a certain AWS technology. Also, in respect to this specific issue, the knee-jerk reaction that people on the AWS forums have in respect to scaling is to set up auto-scaling policies. Simple and intuitive ideas like hosting static websites on S3, hosting secure content on EC2, and combining the two, has very poor coverage in both the AWS documentation and on the Internet in general.