Have you looked into Rackspace Cloud? Full disclosure: I work at Rackspace, but I honestly believe that Cloud Servers + Cloud Database (hosted MySQL) at Rackspace is vastly superior choice for a reasonably large number of projects/products than AWS.
IMO, the perfect setup for most non-Facebook sized money-making web apps is nearly always dedicated SSD-powered database hardware connected to a cheap cloud of virtual boxes to serve requests. Spending engineering $$$ on scaling your data across unreliable virtual instances often is not a good idea.
Going all-dedicated, if you can afford it, is great for pretty good uptime at zero engineering cost. I recommend SoftLayer for this: they sell cheap and reliable dedicated servers connected to pretty good networks (just stay away from their older Dallas-based DCs, but DC5 is good).
IMO, the perfect setup for most non-Facebook sized money-making web apps is nearly always dedicated SSD-powered database hardware connected to a cheap cloud of virtual boxes to serve requests. Spending engineering $$$ on scaling your data across unreliable virtual instances often is not a good idea.
Going all-dedicated, if you can afford it, is great for pretty good uptime at zero engineering cost. I recommend SoftLayer for this: they sell cheap and reliable dedicated servers connected to pretty good networks (just stay away from their older Dallas-based DCs, but DC5 is good).