Dating site startups should read the WSJ article Small Firms Tap Amazon’s Juice, which chronicles how companies are leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS). The AWS page at Amazon contains information about building Facebook applications on AWS, the DevPay billing system and SimpleDB, which I’ve mentioned in the past.
The beginning of an options matrix starts to look like this.
- White label (easiest, give up most revenue)
- Hosted by dating script provider (medium-difficulty, some loss of control over site management)
- Self-hosted (Full control of environment, high degree of effort to launch)
- Write by scratch (all the pain and enjoyment of software development, with complete control over features and functionality)
- AWS (set it and forget it, cheaper hosting, robust scalable hosting environment and endless bandwidth)
Today’s $100k dating site will cost much less next year using these services, but developers are still the largest expense after marketing costs are factored into the buildout plan.
I’d love to see examples of sites built on Amazon’s platform, leave url’s in the comments.
