I didn't say they were. I asked them to provide an alternative rather than pretending a single dedicated server is comparable to AWS.
>Most companies
I don't care what most companies need. I am not trying to argue, I am asking the people insisting that nobody should ever use amazon to provide a reasonable alternative or stop making sweeping generalizations.
>We could easily afford two 32-core database servers within our budget, and their performance translates to a whole bunch of Amazon's fastest instances.
Did you seriously not notice how you aren't addressing anything I said, but just repeating exactly what I pointed out wasn't relevant? I don't need more cores, I need reliable storage. What is my EBS? Until we're big enough to be running our own datacenters, there's not really a reasonable alternative that I can find. I am asking for advice, not "more cores!".