The Cloud is Cheaper than Bare Metal
Well, I don't know about yours but many organizations are looking into the Cloud at large to lower their cost and increase reliability. Looking at Amazon EC2, prices seem expensive when you are on a tight budget, especially if you belong to a small organization.
However, as this article demonstrates, the price gap between using the Cloud and maintaining your own servers is narrowing.
[via High Scalability]
A crash course in modern hardware
If you have not reviewed lately how modern CPUs operate and how they differs from CPUs that you grew up with, you may want to watch this video. It is quite long but certainly instructive.
You will learn about what impacts performance today and how Donald Knuth was right all along. :-)
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil" — Donald Knuth