Basecamp have fairly consistant loads, and I assume the content is mostly custom produced for each user in their ruby for rails servers (so not much use of cached content on a CDN etc). They're basically renting expensive server boxes and database instances from Amazon, it would make sense that its cheaper to run themselves.
Would be interesting to hear what the target level of availability is for the Basecamp services, and what the overhead from running their own infrastructure is after a year.
Would be interesting to hear what the target level of availability is for the Basecamp services, and what the overhead from running their own infrastructure is after a year.