2 companies that decided to use a CLOUD

I found two great quotes from a couple of startup companies that used Amazon EC2 Cloud service. These quotes tell you how the cloud is a true benefit...(if you are short on time, just read the bolded sections)

Summary:
Unless you are very good at predicting your future needs AND you have the capital expense to support that prediction, your project could be a good candidate for a cloud implementation.

Quote #1
Running an Internet startup remains a tricky business, says ShareThis. During the past two years, more than 110,000 sites have added the ShareThis, allowing readers to forward articles or videos to their friends. The popularity has made the company's data requirements enormous: it handles up to 12,000 requests a second and 130 million page views every day.

In the planning stages, the startup realised that potential success would mean that it would have to establish a data centre -- and pay for provisioning the infrastructure -- before its business took off, says Nanda Kishore, CTO of ShareThis. Understandably, the business balked at such costs.

"If you look at a traditional data centre model, it is very clumsy," Kishore says. "Your need to buy capacity is always ahead of demand (and) if you don't have the traffic, you've built up all this capacity and you are stuck with a fixed cost."

Quote #2
“We explored renting CPUs, and grid computing models, but the costs were prohibitive. Plus, the ones that operated at any scale only allowed batch operation. There was no effective real-time computing option,” said Paul Hammann, VP Datacenter Operations for Powerset. “Then we explored Amazon’s web-scale computing model and Amazon EC2. The decision was easy. Amazon delivered all the functionality, flexibility and scalability we needed at a fraction of what it would’ve cost us to build it out ourselves.”

For Powerset to operate effectively, it would require enormous amounts of expensive back-end infrastructure, meaning, much of Powerset’s investment capital would have to be spent on CPUs, terminal switches, cable, racks, datacenters, hosting, and expensive power from Silicon Valley. They recognized the huge benefit of someone else managing this infrastructure for them