Amazon have been running their various web services for a while now and they have been very successful, but it seems that there are a lot of people who do not fully understand what they are getting into when they sign up. When you listen to the Amazon engineers describing what they have produced, they make it sound as if they have achieved quite a lot, which is true, but they will stay away from mentioning any of the disadvantages, almost as if their management has given them some training on what to say. Their EC2 service sounds like it can give you a good deal, because you only pay for the amount of computing power that you use, but if your site gets hit by some bots, then you will suddenly find that your bill has gone up, with a risk of your data suddenly disappearing if you do not pay it. Amazon EC2 instances do not have any form of local backup and your data can suddenly be gone even if the instance decides to crash for an unknown reason, but Amazon does state this disadvantage up front, so the only people that get burned are the ones who are too ignorant to read the medium print. Amazon do also offer a free tier that you can use if you sign up with them, but they do require that you give credit card details