I didn't expect to see so much hate for Metallica. Yes, the black album was marginal and everything after that pretty lame except for Death Magnetic if you can get past the compression issue. Death Magnetic is fucking awesome and the drum work is simply amazing. I used to know how to play every song on every album through the black album on guitar, so I obviously love Metallica and was pretty disappointed with the last few, but to say that Death Magnetic sucks means you either haven't really listened to it or you just don't like Metallica. Funny how people can hate so much and yet they couldn't pluck out mary had a little lamb if their life depended on it.

Risk vs Reward. Cash strapped startups can use Amazon Web Services to scale their app to hundreds of servers temporarily when they have that initial spike of interest. There is no affordable way to do this with traditional dedicated servers. When the traffic spike ebbs, server instances are terminated and costs go back to normal.

The risk is trusting your infrastructure and data to a third party, but if this is the risk you have to take to make it in business, I would say it is acceptable, at least until you can afford dedicated machines.

I think what Amazon is doing is amazing. Google got it all wrong by forcing you into their way of doing things. You must develop in python (this may have changed) and use their API. With Amazon, you can use any language and nearly any flavor of OS (mostly linux) you want to use. You can use any software or framework to build your apps. It's total freedom. There is no vendor lock in. If you decide to go dedicated one day, you can do it, no problem.