In all honesty, it would be great if Jim or John looked into cloud-based infrastructure like Amazon Web Services.
I have migrated my company’s infrastructure to be entirely hosted from Amazon Web Services (and spread out the technology using their database hosting, their Simple Storage Service, and their on-demand computing instances) and it’s been a godsend. No more worrying about hardware or downtime (though the possibility exists, it’s out of my control). Plus, I can set it up to scale up and scale down as demand hits, to automatically add servers and shut them down after a traffic spike (I’ll soon implement Amazon Auto Scaling to add a number of “servers” each day during my company’s morning rush and release them in the early afternoon).
So FR should move from its own servers to those of a major internet company?? Not so fast. All of a sudden FR's continued existence could be threatened by a corrupt government pressuring that company with all sorts of threats (investigation, IRS, etc.) if it continued to allow FR stories and comments disparaging that government/administration to be published from its servers. How long do you think FR would be able to provide a conservative voice on the net with the threat of being shutout??
I'm sure Jim and John would say "No thanks" to your suggestion.
I admit I don't understand what's involved with that kind of thing, but:
Suppose they did that. Suppose FR became dependent on another privately owned entity. Then suppose that other privately owned entity decided they didn't like FR’s politics or position on a particular issue and decided to cut FR off, as many here would say is their right.
What then?
Amazon Web ServicesA very, very bad idea for FR, in my opinion. A lot of unknown (mostly leftwing) people will have their dirty little fingers deep inside the FR pie.
Not to mention unintended problems. Have you heard of dirty drives in the cloud? It's all the news these days.