[craigkerstiens]

We've had a few people migrate from Heroku and RDS over to Crunchy Bridge and see 2.5x performance improvement on warm cache and up to 5-6x performance improvement on cold cache for the exact same $ spend. I can't say easily how that would compare to raw EC2 cause it really depends on how you tune and configure. But there is definitely some opportunity to optimize vs. any stock install and setup.

The real thing about EC2 is it'll be cheaper. But when you do have a bad day, say page corruption you're gonna have more than a bad day and a bad week/month trying to untangle that. I'm not sure how helpful RDS is in those cases. I can say that Heroku historically was solid (I was there way back in the day having helped build the service). And there are some other options that can still deliver good performance, good support, at a balanced price.