Amazon seem to be blazing a trail with their flexible computing (Elastic Compute Cloud - Amazon EC2) and flexible storage (Simple Storage Service - Amazon S3) products that allow anyone to deploy scalable Internet services easily, see Jon Udell's experiences documented here Amazon.com's rent-a-grid | InfoWorld | Column | 2006-08-30 | By Jon Udell
He notes this may not be the best option if you need a dedicated machine with continuous demand:
As the blogosphere quickly noted, the EC2 rate of a dime per instance-hour works out to $72 per month for the equivalent of a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU with 1.75GB of RAM and 160GB of local disk. And that doesn’t include bandwidth, billed separately at the S3 rate of 20 cents per gigabyte. So for now, if you want to park one box on the Internet and leave it running indefinitely, better deals can be had from dedicated hosting providers. As the service’s name suggests, though, if you need an elastic capability that can nimbly grow or shrink, EC2 is the only game in town.
Other alternatives include 3tera.
Posted by mofoghlu at September 1, 2006 02:42 PM