The traffic within Amazon EC2 and S3 is free

The traffic within Amazon EC2 and S3 is free, so you can have setups as funky as you wish. Remeber what it takes to build Flickr or Livejournal datacenter? Now you can do similar setups from home (unbelievable) and just let Amazon take care of the networking and hardware. This is so much more ‘WebOS’ than Google’s walled garden.

I applaud Amazon.

Please note that EC2 is not limited to web hosting applications, far from it. It makes even more sense to use it for virtual render farms, to run simulations and other tasks that require a lot of computing power but are usually executed only once in a while. So if you need for ex. 100 instance-hours to complete the computation, you can make your own cluster of 20 machines of similar power (will cost about $10000 for hardware alone) and complete the task in 5 hours, you can use EC2 to create this virtual cluster, compute and then shut it down when done and pay much less — $10 per job. Or you could use EC2 to create a 200 machine virtual cluster, complete the job in half an hour and pay the same $10 for it. Think about that.