[dkersten]

I often hear that the best way to use AWS is to host your 24/7 stuff elsewhere and use AWS for the spikes. This makes a lot of sense, but I always wonder what the recommended (ie most cost-effective, especially in regards to bandwidth costs) place to host te 24/7 stuff? For example, moving a ton of data between EC2 and S3 is free (for bandwidth; ignoring requests costs), but moving 10TB out costs $0.12/GB which seems quite costly...

I guess the sweet spot is to use external hosting for your web apps and such and AWS for any large spike-prone batch processing: moving data into S3 is free (though obviously moving data out of wherever else you're hosting probably isn't), use EC2 to process it (possibly on spot instances!) and then move the results (which are much smaller than the raw data for a lot of use cases) back to the 24/7 hosts?

Though my question still remains: where do HNers recommend to host these servers knowing that AWS will be used to pick up the slack and handle irregular/unpredictable workloads?