AWS vs Heroku vs something else for scalable platform?
Considering you're a startup with no funds for own server farm. Which existing solution can give you a peace of mind that any sudden increase in traffic won't bring everything down.
I know it's not just up to hardware, so we plan to have at least a load balancer, memcache and few db servers.
Is it possible to have a setup on AWS that would automatically add instances and bandwidth if the traffic increases?
What other advice you could give to deployment noobs? Thanks.
ps: I apologize in advance if a question is too broad or reflects inexperience on mentioned topics, but that's why I ask.
Answer
Heroku. Because you're a start-up, keep things lean and it doesn't get leaner than almost free (with 1 dyno + small shared DB). Spend time building your product, not on the infrastructure. You don't want to be installing patches when you should be talking to customers. Heroku is also flexible and allows you to scale up 'dynos' as your traffic increases so no worries about growing there. Heroku won't scale automatically for you, though, so do your own server monitoring. Heroku add-ons are also nice.