AWS isn't that hard to configure. ElasticFox puts a nice GUI to it and while it will take a short while to get used to the AWS way of doing things, you're better off.

With AWS, you have a nice spray files everywhere storage in S3, EC2 provides lots of RAM and CPU muscle, EBS provides RAID-level reliable persistent storage for EC2 that can be backed up to multiple data centers with a single API call, CloudFront even gives you the chance to have static files served from 12 different locations in the world making your latency very small. If you need more servers, no problem just wait a few minutes for them to boot. If you need more bandwith, it's automatic. If you need more storage, S3 is infinite and EBS can always give you more (you can even stripe the drives so that you could have terrabyte after terrabyte of storage as a single drive).

Dedicated servers have little upside. You're relying on physical hardware in a very acute fashion. While AWS runs on real hardware, there's an abstraction level which helps a lot. Let's say you're small and want a single box. That box fails, you call your host and get a new one in a couple hours, you restore from backups for another couple hours maybe and you're back online. Of course, many often don't test their disaster recovery scenarios that well and are often met with little problems. With AWS, you simply boot another machine off that image and you're good. Worst case, your EBS gets trashed and you say, "hey, S3, rebuild that EBS drive". Easy by comparison.

Real boxes are a pain. You have to deal with RAID, backups, how fast your company can provision new boxes, bleh! AWS (or even Slicehost and Linode) isolate you from a lot of that mess. There's a reason virtualization is the hot new topic.

AWS isn't that hard to use. It's definitely different, but it makes so many other things so much less painful. If you want some of the benefits of AWS with a "simple as dedicated" feel, try Slicehost. You can get instances with as much as 15.5GB of RAM and they just give you the instance with your choice of Linux on it. From there, you can install Apache, MySQL, other. And you get benefits like cheap and easy backups - they just store an image of the machine. Then, if you need more capacity, you can boot one of those images as a new instance, now you have another server. If one of their servers fails, they can easily migrate your instance to another box. RAID10 is already set up. Easy.

If you're worried about AWS' management being a little different, don't worry too much. It's not that bad once you start using it - just a tad hard to imagine without trying it. If you're still worried, Slicehost will give you instances that will work like you're used to dedicated hosting working, but with many of the advantages of AWS.

The best posts are ones that say something surprising (e.g. not just a reporter writing a routine story about a familiar topic), and say it in a convincing way, with depth of argument, and numbers, if applicable.

Posts about how to do things oneself, and how things work, tend to be particularly appreciated. This is an audience that likes to know the details.

Posts don't have to be about hacking, so long as they talk in detail about something novel or surprising. Though arguably anything that talks about the internal details of how something works is about hacking, in the broader sense.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411994

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406885

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418776

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414330

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418329

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414226

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414502

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418098

Sorry, back to the drawing board then, and design a system that works in the real world. It's probably not too far off from what we have now, and should be reasonably free, no doubt about that, but it should be designed to muddle along with the muddly creatures that comprise its actors, rather than some sort of idealized system that will never come to fruition. Those apes tend to have both collectivist and individualistic tendencies, and ignoring one in favor of the other is a bad idea.

We've heard a lot in recent months about how the current crisis proves that "unfettered capitalism" doesn't work and that libertarian political philosophy is (intellectually) bankrupt. Libertarians, we are told, are running scared.

The quote above is one small example of why this claim is rubbish. The banking and financial sectors have been heavily regulated for at least 70 years; this has created the kind of cartel virtually impossible to form in a free market. And what happened to the SEC is so common it has a name: regulatory capture, the capture of the regulatory agency by the special interests of the industry being regulated.

There's plenty of blame to go around: the global financial crisis has many causes. Laissez-faire capitalism isn't one of them.

My immediate next thought was, "I wonder what obvious things I don't know that might save me countless hours."

Is there a wiki for this sort of thing? There needs to be one.

In the end I chose to run Xen on top of dedicated hardware, which has essentially bought us the best of both worlds: simple scaling and low costs. Granted, it would probably take me a couple hours to start up a dozen more VMs (I'd need to requisition new hardware) as opposed to a few minutes and S3 is still cheap for mass storage, but neither of these points had any relevance to our situation.

As mentioned by others, it all comes down to what your project needs.

Leftists are saying that the problem was that the system was too free. Libertarians are saying that the main problem lies with the corruption and inefficiency of regulation. Neither point is trivial, neither point can be dismissed as ideological rhetoric.

There are those libertarians who will always blame the government for every problem until we live under Rothbardian anarchy. You may think that position is idiotic, and you are welcome to do so. However, the leftists who blame every problem on "the unfettered free market" sound equally idiotic to my ears in a world with regulatory agencies with multi-billion dollar budgets and hundreds of thousands of pages of rules controlling trillions of dollars of capital every day.

So, don't dismiss all claims of misregulation even if some of the critics are unhinged. After all, if something is wrong there, we would expect it to have large effects. My old firm spent at least a seven-figure number each year to comply with regulatory rules, and it wasn't very large.

1$ in China = 2 Packs of Cigarettes or 3 bowls of noodles

1$ in Africa = 2 Meals of Rice or 2 trips on a motorcycle

Why subsidize something that is so cheap? It's pointless and counterproductive. Treat other countries not like aid recipients, but like real people who can be traded with, and are happy to get cheap stuff just like you are.