What are the advatages over normal servers. You can get (2x120GB intel ssd (75k iops each)/32gb ram/250 Mbit/s garanteed) servers for around 50$/Month from reputable hosters.
I prefer cloud based solutions where load is going to be an issue, but only sporadic load. You can easily spin up a new instance, pay for what you use and not be paying for it the rest of the year too. With the load balances available, this can even be made automatic.
It's also good if you want a dev environment which is exactly the same as production. spin up an environment for a day, then spin it down and only pay for usage.
But there are also downsides - you also want at least 2 servers of anything up at any time in case of a datacenter outage or upgrade. But I guess the availability is the upside of that.
