I don't necessary agree with this post. Many m1 hosts have been upgraded from the original Opteron 2218 hardware to Xeon E5430. In the US East region you may st

I don't necessary agree with this post. Many m1 hosts have been upgraded from the original Opteron 2218 hardware to Xeon E5430. In the US East region you may still end up getting an m1.small 2218 though. EC2 fixes CPU allocation, so you won't get very good performance on an m1.small... 1 ECU just isn't designed to provide much compute power (1-1.2 GHz) With spot pricing, you can get small instances for typically about $0.04/hr which is reasonable if you just need a simple web server (EC2 gives you 100 Mb/s+ uplink and generally very good bandwidth & low latency). The newer m2 instances use x5550 Nehelem hardware and perform quite well. You'll generally get the most compute power for the money with an m2.xlarge instance (6.5 ECUs) which generally performs much better than the supposedly 20 ECU c1.xlarge Xeon E5410 instance. m2.xlarge can generally be had for around $0.17-0.30/hr (spot pricing) which is very reasonable for 17GB ram (compare to Rackspace Cloud $0.96/hr for 16GB cloud server running on less powerful Opteron 2374 hardware). If you are interested in other providers, I've done a complete specs/performance/price analysis of 20 different cloud providers including EC2 here: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchmarking-in-cloud.html http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...