I can see EC2 gets expensive for larger instances, but the micro instances make the economics more favourable. FWIW this is a low bandwidth app as well. For te

I can see EC2 gets expensive for larger instances, but the micro instances make the economics more favourable. FWIW this is a low bandwidth app as well. For testing I can spin the server up and down as I need and literally pay per-hour (+ the storage cost). As far as I can tell providers like Linode don't provide that level of flexibility. Thanks for the suggestions about Chef (http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home) I hadn't come across it before.