[cplease]

Honestly, this seems to me like a case study in getting carried away by cloud. There's a very strong case for cloud hosting when you have a clear need for elasticity and an distributed application to leverage it.

Here, you have your entire business in one non-distributed Amazon instance. Amazon does not provide excellent service, availability, flexibility, or value for this model. It is in every way inferior to what you would get from colo or managed dedicated server hosting. Hosting your whole business on a single anonymous Amazon cloud instance that you can't walk up to and touch is engineering malpractice.

[sytse]

We're pretty aware of the advantages and drawback of the cloud. We moved from AWS to a private server and then back to AWS. You're right that cloud hosting makes more sense if you need scaling. The move described was to a single server. But now that we have the data on AWS we can expand. Probably the first step will be a separate fileserver and appserver. After that we can add multiple appservers and consider availability zone failover.