Obviously you are a tech-business guy and practical I agree with u 100%.
I could tell you lots of stories about Super-UI-Architects, Evangelist Developers and crappy titles like that who claim to be the cream of the cream, don't bad judge me, they can be good and have a great knowledge, but they cost to your company a lot of extra money, time and headaches, usually are people who post code in github.
Those guys usually love to create the wheel again and again, they avoid to do the job in an easy way, just creating complexity. When I see a resume "Stuff-Architect, Something-Evangelist" I automatically send those resumes to the recycle bin.
1)Create your own cloud, make them "servers" and make them host personal projects, cool apps, ask your friends to try to hack your "servers", just to try security policies etc..
2)Donate them to charity and use your new free time for some beers and meet girls in the new country. :))
A couple of years ago Amazon went offline for 4 days, also they have security problems. Not considering them right now. I heard the cheapest dedicated servers are from godaddy, don't know anything about their technical people working there...
Thanks for the answer, yes we are thinking in Collocation, we offer different kind of services, will start moving the lightest service first, just to see if we can handle the situation and learn from our own experience.
Yes, do your homework, research user home countries, habits. Try to make your email to be a rich html with a short abstract of your product/service, then provide a link to your page with the user encrypted in a variable in the URL, so you can track exactly who enters your website because of the email.
You can also try some hack advantage scripts embedded in the email, some scripts can be activated when the user opens the email.
Important,before starting an email campaign, you should ask your users when they register or in the settings website page the "do you want to receive notifications, promotions blah blah blah", and also make sure they can "unsubscribe" with a link in your email(you will also can catch user information).
My personal experience, some years ago I was doing some working for a government agency which needed to send dome emails to users, we found that at midday we were receiving approx. 75% of all answers to the email campaign.
Which kind of service are you promoting? Do you have age-segments?
Time ago was on a workshop with a serial entrepreneur/investor on SV, and he told to the audience to be not afraid to tell to "the right people" your idea(you need to let the world know about your business) "at right time".
First you need to know what kind of customer you are targeting, for example if you're emailing to usa the majority of the population lives in the EST zone. Focus your emails on hitting that time zone (unless you have the capability to segment your list by geographic location and send in staggered sends). Weekends are not good. Mondays are also not good, I frequently use Mondays to delete all spam and junk or unimportant emails. Probably Wednesdays, Thursdays are the best days of the week.
You can't do absolutely nothing, once you upload something(encrypted or not) by default is public, dropbox/gdrive etc.., even if you send an email it is public.
Is really naive thinking that "some storage outside US/NSA jurisdiction (and I'm using encjs encrypted storage" will stop government to reach you, because they really don't care about jurisdiction.
I could tell you lots of stories about Super-UI-Architects, Evangelist Developers and crappy titles like that who claim to be the cream of the cream, don't bad judge me, they can be good and have a great knowledge, but they cost to your company a lot of extra money, time and headaches, usually are people who post code in github.
Those guys usually love to create the wheel again and again, they avoid to do the job in an easy way, just creating complexity. When I see a resume "Stuff-Architect, Something-Evangelist" I automatically send those resumes to the recycle bin.