This amateur hour bullshit is really starting to piss me off.  h20 may be a coin trading wizard, but he clearly doesn't know dick about IT ops.  I bet he uses software raid and ebs volumes to back his mysql db.  Database needs to "catch up"?  Please.  He needs to profile his database queries and get some REAL i/o.  Not this ebs shit.  CloudSigma is all ssd, would be a good choice.