We've been going back and forth on whether or not to use S3 and EC2.
At the moment we're only planning on using EC2 for computationally expensive tasks like generating thumbnails, PDFs, and that sort of thing.
We might use S3 for storage of large files, but probably not small frequently accessed ones because of the per-request charges and latency.
We're going to try to build an architecture that's not tied to one particular hosting method... we could start out on EC2 and if it doesn't work out then move to dedicated boxes. And even then if there's a particularly heavy load we could fire up additional EC2 instances.
The nice thing about EC2 is it's pretty easy to experiment. There's no big up-front costs with setting it up, so there's not too much to lose by testing.
At the moment we're only planning on using EC2 for computationally expensive tasks like generating thumbnails, PDFs, and that sort of thing.
We might use S3 for storage of large files, but probably not small frequently accessed ones because of the per-request charges and latency.
We're going to try to build an architecture that's not tied to one particular hosting method... we could start out on EC2 and if it doesn't work out then move to dedicated boxes. And even then if there's a particularly heavy load we could fire up additional EC2 instances.
The nice thing about EC2 is it's pretty easy to experiment. There's no big up-front costs with setting it up, so there's not too much to lose by testing.