First off, The "average" PHP / MySQL shop will almost never be cheaper on amazon. Are you kidding me? The average php and mysql website has one server or less.

First off, The "average" PHP / MySQL shop will almost never be cheaper on amazon. Are you kidding me? The average php and mysql website has one server or less. You dont have 2, or 3. So either throw out some stats and numbers or stop bullshitting people. There are enough people blindly drinking the cloud hosting koolaid without the fake facts. Im talking 3 figures because thats what I assume most startups need for their twitter/facebook/whatever app. It only becomes even more ridiculously expensive to stay with EC2 once you get bigger. You cant just say "well, once you are big its better!" Its not. Once you get bigger, the downfalls of relying on ec2 (for anything besides overflow) are even worse. The more servers you have and the more bandwidth you do, the more cash you throw out the window. In fact as you get bigger you would be irresponsible to your shareholders to rely on amazon and not hire your own engineer. You know why? Its cheaper to have your own engineer and manage xx servers on colo then it is to have amazon. Not to mention you will still need a server guy once you get to that size anyways. Theres a reason you dont find any sites in the top 100 running their businesses entirely off of amazon. Its not financially prudent. Its a easy way out and not the /right/ way out. Also, we are not talking about s3, simple DB or CDS, so stop bringing that up. We are talking about EC2. You dont get to say that EC2 is awesome because S3 exists. They are separate products.