[gs8]

Didn't know you were in UK. Colo/Dedicated server costs are definitely higher than here in the US. You might want to look for another dedicated server provider rather than the cloud.

The best way to get good disk IO from EC2 is setting up using a medium or larger instance and setting up a software raid.

[chrislomax]

Thanks for the info. I was going to get the double extra large on my db server and double processor for the web servers.

Don't know what to do, I am finding myself pricing up SAN's etc this morning.

It's all down to time, I have the knowledge to do it all myself but I don't really want the responsibility. I don't want to go on holiday and the whole of our system to depend on me. I can make it as redundant as possible but as usual there is a cost behind that. More servers are more money.

We currently spend around 17k a year though on dedicated servers so to seriously save some money I would look at spending around that on actual hardware.