Let's look outside the USA: Here in Germany, hosting is rediclious cheap. You get decent quad core boxes with 12GB RAM for about 70EUR (~100$) including 2-3TB

Let's look outside the USA: Here in Germany, hosting is rediclious cheap. You get decent quad core boxes with 12GB RAM for about 70EUR (~100$) including 2-3TB of traffic. Compared to ec2 it's reeeealy cheap and located in the middle of continental europe. The Dublin/Ireland location of EC2 has a much higher latency and is more expensive than the US instances. So most startups [1] rent a lot of those cheap boxes in Germany, doing a loadbalancing/failover setup in front of it. done. If you need more hardware: It usually takes <24hrs to get a new box. So just order 1-2 more than you currently need as backup for scaling and faults. [1] I analyzed that from the most popular hosting provider of http://IsItRails.com http://IsItRails.com