On: A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web A...

[artifaxx]

Thanks for all the replies. I am just researching all of this for my own startup and it is important to understand all the tradeoffs. And it is clear from your article that AWS has a very deep feature set. Its a good article!

[seunosewa → artifaxx]

But do you need the features? Are they important enough to be worth getting locked into an expensive ecosystem over?

Look at Reddit, they have very few employees yet they can't make a profit because their hosting costs are massive.

Contrast them with StackExchange, which uses a small number of powerful, well-optimized servers and is very profitable.

[seunosewa → seunosewa]

Actually, technically, StackExchange is not profitable yet: (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2015/01/20.html). However, "We could just slow down our insane hiring pace and get profitable right now, but it would mean foregoing some of the investments that let us help more developers."

[joshpadnick → artifaxx]

Thank you!