Thanks for the feedback, atonse! We had a great amount of fun putting this together, as you can imagine.

I agree, a remarkable take-away for us was how dramatically our i7s excelled over the EC2 instances. Admittedly, those were EC2 Large and not Extra Large instances.

A previous draft of this blog entry had a long-winded analysis of hosting costs--discussing the balance between ease and peace-of-mind provided by something like AWS versus the raw performance of owned hardware--but we elected to remove that since it wasn't really the point of the exercise.