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Yes, it is different. At the time he wrote that, there was literally one hosted FreeBSD box running all of reddit. It was called... 1.reddit.com. Eventually the database had to be moved to a separate machine called... 2.reddit.com.

reddit now runs on a few hundred Ubuntu EC2 instances.

He also says "the reddit code itself is not incredibly complex," which I imagine is less true now.

There’s no need to leave it to imagination: https://github.com/reddit/reddit

Right, but I don't know how complex it was at that time in the past.

Does EC2 offer FreeBSD?

Not officially.

cperciva (HN username), FreeBSD security guy, maintains some AMIs for it: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/