[Sebb767]

> The price for performance ratio on cloud providers is so poor that you can overprovision in advance (to mitigate the extra delay involved in adding extra hardware) and still come out ahead.

It really depends on what scale you're talking about. When you're a startup and suddenly land on the front page of HN, you might need 100x or 1000x your current capacity - in which case AWS will be useful to no end.

If, on the other hand, you're an established name with quite a bit of traffic already and the maximum uptick you will reasonably experience is 2x-3x, the argument holds far less water.

[ddorian43]

Feel free to point to these cases where people scaled 1000x when they hit the HN frontpage. Especially their database.