and this is the reason why you let other people pay to test the infrastructure "cloud". it's hard to justify not being able to do _anything_ when any AWS goes down as smugmug must be figuring out by now.

here's a piece of advice: start by leasing a couple of $75 USD per month servers. if you can, buy instead of lease. if you go bust, you can sell the hardware on ebay whereas with AWS you can't do any of that it's just money you're throwing away for 0 assets. AWS still needs to be managed, you still need sysadmins available 24/7 so you won't save any money there. the only thing AWS has going for it is provisioning. be smart and take advantage of that (eg. have your own physical infrastructure and be able to send some of the load the way of AWS if and when you need to).