[maratd]

It depends on your application. Every provider has their own stack running in the back, their own policies, and a unique set of existing users. This translates to unique environments that are more or less suitable for certain needs.

My experience with EC2 is that you get more RAM for the buck when compared to Rackspace and others, but IO to disk and CPU is sub-par. As a result, I tend to prefer Rackspace who are also big players in the open source space.

Keep in mind, regardless of any advertising, there is no such thing as guaranteed performance in the cloud. Ever. Every provider oversubscribes ... they do not expect and cannot handle 100% utilization by their subscriber base. Behind the scene, a VPS is sharing all of its resources, always. If your provider does its job right, you'll never experience a drop in performance. Everything will be consistent. But there is no way for that provider to guarantee that. They can experience an unexpected jump in resource usage at any time.

With dedicated hosting, that's not a possibility. It's your hardware. You're the only one using it.

[nckbz]

>> My experience with EC2 is that you get more RAM for the buck when compared to Rackspace and others, but IO to disk and CPU is sub-par. As a result, I tend to prefer Rackspace who are also big players in the open source space.

Seconding this. And I'd recommend a hybrid solution if it's possible. Dedicated db server with some cloud webheads for your front end. I really think that's the best bang for your buck. Has anyone tried the Amazon RDS or the RackSpace R2 servers? I'd really like to know if they provide any advantages over just straight up hosting your database on another cloud instance.

[dotBen]

The ultimate hybrid is to find a budget VPS (or premium VPS) provider who is based in the same datacenter as your 'bare metal' servers. Granted VPS != cloud, but depending on your requirements you might get the same benefits.

The benefit here is that you can exchange data between servers/VPS's via the private LAN - low latency and potentially no bandwidth costs.

If you go with an Amazon based solution then you don't have this benefit due to the NAT-like way Amazon works and the fact they either own their own datacenters or at least don't allow any private routes between other servers in the same DC.

(I don't know whether every Amazon availability zone is in a wholly operated Amazon datacenter)