[mmt]

> And that's not even taking into account the cost of the brain power to make sure your hardware stays up and running.

Although, as I said upthread, I agree that AWS is very likely ideal for this particular deployment size, let me try to dispell this oft-repeated myth.

Modern server hardware takes almost no "brain power" (or effort of any kind) to keep up and running.

We aren't living in the days of the early dot-com boom where Linux-on-Intel in the datacenter could mean flimsy cases, barely rack-mountable, with nary a redundant part to be seen.

Applying some up front "brain power", one can even choose and configure hardware in such a way as to provide things like server-level redundancy, if that's important and/or preferable to intra-server redundancy (think Hadoop), or the ability to abandon mechanical disks in place instead of ever having to replace one.