Q:

For very beginning startup: home server or EC2?

The micro instance of Amazon EC2 only has ram of 613MB, my laptop got 8GB. And I suppose likewise the processing power of my computer would be better than the micro instance. 
My question is, what are the considerations in deciding to host yourself or on Amazon EC2, especially for a really baby startup?
For example, would network speed be a problem? My computer broadband network is 100Mbs up to 1Gbs. What would Amazon compare to this?
My site at these moment would just host some images and perform some php requests. I would probably also use cloudflare but seems it increases the dns lookup time considerably... And of course the overall  objective is to make the best user experience. 

A:

With very few exceptions never host from a laptop.
They're almost the diametric opposite of a server, they have little or no resilience to handle any failure whatsoever, are typically designed for battery life not performance, have slow disks usually, even their NICs aren't particularly capable.
Oh and your broadband is highly unlikely to be 100Mb-to-1Gb, that's the speed of the interface not your outgoing speed, in fact hosting via broadband is usually a very bad idea because your upstream speed is a fraction of your download speed.
We're professional sysadmins on this site (as I'm sure you read in our FAQ), we don't mess about, if you're just running a minecraft server or similar you may get away with what you have but if you care at all about your 'clients' then don't consider using a laptop or broadband link to serve them.

A:

If you have a business, you need real hosting, not some stuff running on your notebook. EC2 is certainly much more reliable than your notebook on a home broadband connection, and you can scale it effortless if your demands get bigger. 
Also, home broadband connections are often asymmetric with a high download speed and a slow upload speed, which makes a home server impossible to begin with. 

A:

I think hosting a live website on your home laptop is a terrible idea, you have to take into account:

If you want reliability, you cannot rely on a laptop. If you have powercuts, if you laptop runs out of power, etc. your website is going to become unavailable. Using Amazon will solve this problem as there data centers will be highly disaster proof with minimum downtime.
In terms of security, how will you be allowing the outside world access to your laptop. You have to consider if the commercial router you will have is providing enough security to allow direct internet access to it.
If you're only running a small website serving up images and a few PHP requests, I do not imagine you will need more than a micro instance, it will be unlikely to be taxing the entire RAM.
Also, with your commercial broadband link, you probably have a very low amount of traffic coming down the link which could cause issues in the future.

I think your best bet will be to continue using Amazon EC2, the cost is minimal for a much better, more reliable service. 

