I organized a panel on cloud computing at the Nantucket Conference last weekend. One of the panelists was Stevie Clifton, founder/CTO of Animoto. He shared a story about Animoto’s experience with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud and going viral on Facebook that speaks for itself so much so that Jeff Bezos used the example in a recent presentation.

Handling this type of spike the old-fashioned way would have been painful and expensive. If you plan on being successful and see these types of spikes in traffic, you should think about cloud computing from day one.