AWS would likely protect us from DDOS attacks in the future.
If by "protect" you mean "allow attackers to use a limitless amount of money"... AWS doesn't have much built-in DDoS protection AFAIK.
I would say that AWS would be one step away from cloudflare (which has it's own security concerns along with other draw backs). The infrastructure that amazon has in place would at least make it more difficult/expensive for attackers to successfully DDoS the forum.
While you can definitely use AWS as part of a very scalable and stable architecture, it's easy for costs to go out of control. For example, a site I used called inkblazers.com is apparently going to shut down very soon because they're spending over $60,000 per month on their AWS hosting. The forum's hosting costs a few thousand dollars per month. Their Alexa rank is 118,092, whereas bitcointalk.org's Alexa rank is 4,568. (They probably have to deliver a lot more data, but that cost is still absolutely ridiculous.)
I am not familiar with inkblazers so I really cannot comment on why they were spending so much money on their hosting. I do know that there have been several reports of people having ridiculous bills because their accounts were "hacked" and were used to mine either bitcoin or altcoins.
I would imagine that the forum would be able to negotiate some terms with Amazon to either keep costs in line or to get some kind of volume discount.
I would not be surprised if sites like instagram (which I believe to at least previously was hosted on AWS) spend more then $60k on hosting every month.
It should be noted that the forum gives away one free advertising spot worth ~4
BTC per week to PIA which would add ~$4,000 to current hosting costs. I am not sure if we get more out of this then the 4 grand per month we give away in free advertising or not, however I imagine that we do.
And AWS doesn't guarantee uptime. Reddit, for example, is apparently based on AWS, and temporary overload errors are very common there. On an average day, bitcointalk.org is usually more stable than Reddit, I think.
There is way too much junk on reddit for me to be a regular user of it, but I will take your word for it.
It's far easier to do things mostly-right if you just use a traditional single server. This also allows more control and better security. (Amazon
doesn't have the best reputation for protecting customers.)
I believe that google offers somewhat of a similar service that amazon offers and they seem to score pretty well on your chart.
Responding to things that other people keep saying elsewhere: Yes, the forum has a lot of money. But this is mostly due to BTC value increases, and it would quickly be depleted if costs increased much higher. Spending at the level of most VC-backed startups would be absolutely reckless. I don't think that the forum can afford more than maybe one additional full-time employee, for example. (Currently the only full-time employees are Slickage. I and the moderators are paid so little that we're basically volunteers. There are also a few part-time contractors.)
Agreed. However there are ways to potentially change this, for example by lowering requirements to become a donator and/or creating a lower donation rank and/or offering an option to pay to remove the 360 second jail/limit (among other ways to increase revenue).
(slightly off topic) - There is no real reason to treat yourself and the other mods like volunteers (granted some are very early adopters of Bitcoin and can afford to volunteer and would benefit financially if their efforts were to positively impact bitcoin) as the forum is kept generally clean with few, if any major issues. Adding revenue would allow the mods to receive a more "fair" income (especially considering the intelligence/qualifications of the majority of the moderators on here).
Believe me, no one finds it more annoying than I do when the forum is down -- I'm usually the one who has to fix it and try to prevent it from happening again... In this case, things are breaking without any obvious cause, so it might take some time to figure this out and get things rock-solid again.
I think the a cost benefit analysis of using AWS (and google's equivalent) should at least be done. Granted it may not be a better solution then what we have now, however I think the amount of hardware/hosting related problems we have had in recent past would make the few hours it would take to do this be time well spent. The worse case scenario is that you have one additional argument against people who
claim bitcointalk is run in a less then professional manner, and the best case scenario is that we have a cost effective way to host the forum that results in an overall better experience for users.
