Rick's picture

If keeping costs down is a main concern, I would go with a reserved small instance then.  There's nothing to say you can't break it up later if necessary.  I am running Piwik on a micro instance just so I can try it out and I am also running BIND on that instance as a third DNS server for redundancy.  Even that concerns me, but so far so good.

In my opinion, micro instances are a good way to test out an appliance or to not pay an arm and a leg while initially setting up your server if it's going to take a bit of time to get everything in place.  When it comes time to go live though, I would run tklbam and then restore that backup to at least a small instance for production use.  If you plan on being up at least a year reserve the instance and run with it.  :-)

I had a site on a shared hosting account begin to get bursts of 8-10,000 hits a day and it took down the whole page. Since then I have been using dedicated servers. You don't want that day to come only to find out the site is down.