I think you should stick to dedicated servers for now.
1. Don't do premature scaling (or optimization). You might be wasting time that could be spent working on the actual service or app. I feel that even with a dedicated solution, the scaling thing is a non issue until you reach a certain critical usage.
2. The cloud solutions(Amazon for example) are not cheap at all, even a small instance is 10 cents an hour and multiply that by 24x7. On the other hand even a VPS from say slicehost for the same config would be around 20 bucks a month.
3. The datastore based cloud options like AppEngine etc, are too restrictive for some kinds of applications.
I think you should stick to dedicated servers for now.
1. Don't do premature scaling (or optimization). You might be wasting time that could be spent working on the actual service or app. I feel that even with a dedicated solution, the scaling thing is a non issue until you reach a certain critical usage.
2. The cloud solutions(Amazon for example) are not cheap at all, even a small instance is 10 cents an hour and multiply that by 24x7. On the other hand even a VPS from say slicehost for the same config would be around 20 bucks a month.
3. The datastore based cloud options like AppEngine etc, are too restrictive for some kinds of applications.