I'm friends with an owner of a small creative business (with multiple departments) and until now they have been using a dedicated server (via a 3rd party) for a lot of internal projects and they've been known to iframe a few small dev projects (like photo galleries, one page sites etc...) off and on for some of their clients (some with hi traffic sites).
They're looking to switch from the dedicated server to a cloud environment. The owner is enamored with amazon's cloud services, but still wanted some alternative options they also want the new environment to mirror the current one as much as possible (linux/centOS, PHP 5.3, mysql databases) but with the ability to scale when desired.
So the misconceptions I need cleared up and questions I have are:
1) I always assumed amazon's cloud service was more suitable for high end high traffic complex web application (Netflix, pinterest, instagram etc...) rather than the typical server use listed above. Is this correct?
2) Is it possible to mirror their current setup on amazon?
3) If number 1 is not true, but they instead chose rackspace, could they run heavy web apps like Netflix, pinterest, instagram on a rackspace cloud server if they ever decided to do something that advanced (is rackspace scaleable in the same way ec2 is)?
1) Amazon AWS is also suitable for this environment, or even smaller ones (they offer instances as small as "Micro", which are far less capable than what you are describing all the way up to GPU compute clusters).
2) Yes. That is a very common setup for an AWS-based solution. In fact, I recently migrated something similar from Rackspace to AWS.
3) #1 is true. However, you can certainly mix what runs on Rackspace and in the AWS cloud. Keep in mind latency and security issues if the two component solutions need to communicate with each other. Rackspace also has a cloud offering, but it is not as mature as Amazons.