Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service is a service that is supposed to take the pain and complexity out of quickly scaling your site when needed. It sounds pretty amazing. You basically get control of an Amazon Machine Image instance which supports only Linux for now. Amazon says an instance...

...is roughly equivalent to a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth (bursting to 1Gb)

Woah. You get all that power for 10 cents per full hour of usage plus the other base Amazon S3 fees. IF you used if all day everyday, this would equal out to around $72 a month. Is that worth the firepower you get? I'd say so. Just look at that RAM for crying out loud. To compare, take a look at popular web host Server Beach. Their cheapest dedicated server plan which begins at $169.00 is only offering 1 gig or RAM, 74 GB of hard disk space and an AMD Athlon 64 3500 processor. Awsome. Your Amazon Machine Image instance doesn't need to be just a web server though. It can be a database server, load balancer, web server or anything else you can thnk of. This DRAMATICALLY reduecs the cost of entry for aspiring web entrpreneurs and I wouldn't be surprise if we start seeing companies looking for people with skills in integrating and consuming Amazon's web services. What gets me excited...

Within a few minutes, you will be able to log into your own instance and start playing!

  ¶ 5:20 AM