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Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

It'd be nice if the comparison compared leased hardware as well, pretty sure that's most-relevant for most startups.

When we started DotSpots in 2007, we leased physical servers from iWeb. It was far cheaper than EC2, but you lose of ton of agility when you can't pave a server and rebuild it from the command line. We switched to EC2 and starting paying a bit more, but we've been able to expand capacity much more nimbly than before.

The only thing I'd recommend running outside of EC2 would be memcache, but that's only if you're really pinching pennies. If you're an early stage startup and you're not running virtual machines, you might be doing something wrong (IMHO).

Why would you run memcache outside of your VLAN though, doesn't that obviate most of the point (speed) by adding so much network latency?

that's what i thought, however amazon's ec2 structure doesn't seem to be the most impressive for memcache throughput...

Yeah, it adds latency, so it won't solve every problem. It does scale a lot better than something that ends up thrashing the disk, though.

Would you recommend it in a scenario where you're serving a significant volume of requests per second?

Depends on your latency needs, how expensive your data is to compute from its source, how big it is, etc. In some cases it'll be cheaper to pay the cost to exit EC2, hit the big memcache box and re-enter EC2 than it would be to rent a few Quad-Mem boxes.

FWIW, our fleet is 100% EC2 - this tradeoff didn't work for us.

It's literally just blank files being requested 10s of millions of times a day, they serve no data which makes a caching layer unnecessary. I just need the log files generated by the requests.

If you can tolerate a few dropped records here and there, use an S3 bucket + logging:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/index.html...

heh s3 works out to $50 a day on my current, in-beta load and that's just for the requests.

Another and somewhat more subtle consideration: if you're deploying web crawlers or related tools from EC2, an increasing number of web sites are blocking access from the Amazon IP blocks due to the volume of vermin.

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