Yes, I took that into account in mulling things over. We do very similar stuff with video streams (post processing) before pushing to Akami. We also use SAN backed storage and Cisco CSM load balancers. All of our equipment is in the US and we use VMWare for everything. I know little about AWS and their virtualization technology but where I work, it would appear we pay a little bit more of a premium for VPS nodes if I assume Amazon rolls their own - the $30K just seems outrageous in this regard. And to top things off, we don't host just one web site; we have a myraid of applications spanning our data centers to deal with all sorts of stuff (many product lines each with their own web site with streaming, flash, user accounts, etc...)