I got a mainstream project launching soon and we've been running tests in the cloud (Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud) for a while. Now, cloud prices are insane compared to what we're used to pay in adult - but it's great for scalability which is what we wanted.
Performance wise we are a bit disappointed with EC2 (slow I/O) and we've had just countless issues with Rackspace Cloud. So we started to look for either managed colocation or self-managed dedicated servers that could be provided fast in case we need to scale our application servers stack.
Of course going with a traditional host is not going to provide the advantages the cloud is offering, like adding 20 servers for 10 hours and paying only for 10 hours (or scaling to
4,000 servers in 3 days like the guys at Animoto).
We got 1 server running in about two hours with Pacific Rack. We will compare performance with our virtual instances to see how much more request per seconds we can do with dedicated hardware vs virtual instances.
Another alternative could be providers like Softlayer that can provide both dedicated servers and cloud instances. For people working with viral mainstream stuff and need some scalability, Pacific Rack seems to have their act together. The real test will be when we ask them to put up 10 servers and see how fast they can do that, but it looks promising!
