I'd argue that most people use Disqus because its more powerful than whatever they had (or didnt have) and it's so easy to setup.
I should redirect the point of my post to targetted more towards small businesses, startups, random hackers, etc.. Obviously if you're a larger company you can do whatever you want, and it will generally work out.
That said, just because "Netflix uses the cloud" doesnt mean it's the right decision for anyone, and they certainly do not use it to handle spikes in traffic. They've publicly stated that their primary reason for AWS/etc was simple the lack of operational complexity that was needed to manage it. Even given that argument, the cloud at a point becomes just as complex, if not more, than just running servers.
One thing that's helped Disqus out is the fact that we can get ridiculously powerful servers to ease the burden of needing to scale out (horizontally) right away. I believe even our smallest database servers are still the maximum size you can run on AWS (in terms of memory).
I should redirect the point of my post to targetted more towards small businesses, startups, random hackers, etc.. Obviously if you're a larger company you can do whatever you want, and it will generally work out.
That said, just because "Netflix uses the cloud" doesnt mean it's the right decision for anyone, and they certainly do not use it to handle spikes in traffic. They've publicly stated that their primary reason for AWS/etc was simple the lack of operational complexity that was needed to manage it. Even given that argument, the cloud at a point becomes just as complex, if not more, than just running servers.
One thing that's helped Disqus out is the fact that we can get ridiculously powerful servers to ease the burden of needing to scale out (horizontally) right away. I believe even our smallest database servers are still the maximum size you can run on AWS (in terms of memory).