[robotadam]

You are very right; I should have tried to have us move to physical hardware before we did. Definitely one of the things that I would have done differently, in hindsight.

The larger EC2 instances (especially for always-on systems like primary databases) do get quite a bit cheaper with the 1-year reserved instance reservations, so if you are on EC2 be sure to get those as soon as you're at a somewhat stable point.

[catch23]

I think the introduction of the SSD is causing site owners to "leave the cloud". I haven't seen any cloud hosting that lets you choose SSD-based disks yet, probably because it's low demand and high expense. The throughput of a single sata3 SSD blows away any kind of raid setup you can accomplish on EC2.

Also, I don't think you even need $10k in hardware. Sounds like you could do just fine with a $3k 1U server. $3k can still get you 16 cores w/ 32GB memory and SSD drives.

[jacques_chester]

SSDs make a stunning difference in performance for large, complex joins that won't fit in RAM. However, I imagine that in 5-10 years time 'the cloud' will use them too; even if only as part of a larger storage pool.

[ericd]

Ehhh those SLC drives are still mighty pricey, if you want a decent number of them raided, you could probably eat up nearly 10k. And the nice Xeons are expensive.

[jdunck]

You're not factoring load balancer, redundant slave, etc.