I wasn't trying to be condescending and I apologize if I hurt any one. I have actually bootstrapped quite a few startups (crashed and burned horribly on the fir

I wasn't trying to be condescending and I apologize if I hurt any one. I have actually bootstrapped quite a few startups (crashed and burned horribly on the first 3, only the 4th one actually made me a bit of money). And when I thought I didn't have enough money saved for what I thought I needed as bare minimum I suffered through another couple of months in my day job before taking the plunge. The entire advantage of Amazons services is that you don't need to pre-purchase too much capacity and you can scale relatively painlessly so long as you designed your server architecture for it. I admire the HotOrNot guys for their "beg, burrow, steal" approach, I wish I had even a fraction of it. And that was exactly the right thing to do back then. But now the infrastructure has improved so much that you don't need to do it for servers. Keep your energies for the other hundreds of battles you'll need to fight on your way & good luck