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While the article is a useful comparison of straight EC2 vs dedicated servers, it doesn't touch on the cloud PaaS options such as Heroku that eliminate so many complications of installing and tuning and maintaining your frameworks. IMO comparing "cloud vs dedicated" without reference to PaaS options is akin to comparing "combustion engines to bicycles" without mentioning motorcycles.

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Thanks for the comment. I thought about it but wanted to keep the post short.

I agree that PaaS is a different story all together. It frees you up from doing most tasks. However a vanilla EC2 instance or dedicated are almost the same in that respect but quite different pricing and performance wise.

We use PaaS because it allows us to focus our energy on the product that the customer sees, rather than on the backend stuff that, done right, never affects the customer. When our small team grows, we can afford to concentrate on our own hardware and make cost-saving decisions. But we are very light on system administration experience, and our scarcest commodity is time, not money.

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