The public Pingdom stats of poorbuthappy.com http://www.pingdom.com/reports/ogy7t9gjlgs0/ show how since the move in January from Mediatemple (gs 20$ plus an extra MySQL container 150$) to Amazon EC, hosting is not only cheaper (the EC2 server plus S3 storage is about 100$/m – ok, the stats don’t show that but I’m telling you) but more importantly, the site is about 50% faster (response times have gone from about 1500 ms to about 1000ms). A 50% increase in response times is a big deal, and we haven’t even done much optimizing on that EC2 server.