Advice on moving to the cloud?

I'll save everyone some reading. The advice was:<p>Don't do it.<p>While I agree that in their particular circumstances that it's probably the correct answer, I don't think it's right for everyone. For one thing, their system isn't tolerant enough of downtime. If one of their databases goes offline, they've got some manual fixing to do to get it back up and going. Ugh. (I took this to mean that if you unplug the network cable, they have manual fixing to do. They might have meant power loss... And that's a little more understandable, but still not something you really want in the cloud.)

You'll have to design your stuff to tolerate failure; use things like Chef for quick deployments so that provisioning new servers isn't a huge pain in the ass.<p>Further, the biggest thing to keep in mind is that your resources are shared. This is not too big of a deal for some applications, but for a database server, this can spell certain death (I/O doesn't virtualize too well; you can mitigate some of this by deploying a lot of slave machines for your reads.)

I think more interesting than the question is the fact that the questions was asked at all, by a company to the customers.<p>I'm a customer of getclickys and in most cases openness like this would be refreshing and it is but there is an element of 'flying by the seat of our pants' that could come across with this post.

I have very very limited experience with EC2, a single small instance, for over a month, but I think that gives me more credibility when I say this, don't use EC2 unless you designed your whole app to run on servers you expect to catch fire and explode at any time, because my single little instance died within a month, then twice it, well, did something I've never seen happen before, blow out a device driver? So I couldn't ssh in, all I got was "PTY allocation request failed on channel 0", so now I'm on my fourth instance. I couldn't imagine the carnage if I had been running tens or hundreds of instances.

I have a very similar volume site (game analytics) ... I've always been afraid of Amazon because of the bandwidth and request based billing. I just use VPSs to scale when I have to ... it helps that my hosting guy is on my MSN Messenger.<p>Edit: Also your site looks terrible in Opera ... the CSS or JS or something isn't loading which is breaking everything.