EC2's hard drives are really, really slow. A crappy Solid State drive I bought for $150 2 years a go is 50x faster than the fastest EC2 hard drive. Shit's gotta change.
Why spend weeks optimizing my DB and SQL queries when an SSD gets me a 50x speed boost. To me it's a no brainer.
I'm talking to the CTO/Founder of a kick ass web host (NephoScale.com) about offering an SSD based option to their service plan. If we get enough interest, we'll be able to offer a Hackers & Founders discount to everyone below.
This web host already has on demand, scriptable cloud hosting ( just like EC2 ), and on top of that, scriptable, on demand, dedicated, single tenant server options, which rocks.
But, I need to tell them what Hacker/Founders want in an SSD based system.
So, can you take 3 minutes and fill out this form.
Cheers,
Jonathan -- Haackers & Founders
aka iamelgringo on HN
I would be wary of running my app on something that out-performs what normal people see. It would give me a distorted view on the project, although I appreciate that during development you need speed.
But it's more than that. Even if you had the fastest latest SSD servers to offer, all your speed would be lost on a poor network connection.
Your users could be miles away from the nearest big node,or not have access to a big pipe and they'd see no real difference, in performance, and you as a developer with a nice shiny SSD, wonder what their problem is?
I agree you need to get fast responses to web apps, but there are so so many factors that contribute to bad performance issues, the hard drives are just a really small part of what could be going wrong.