You're pretty close to something I've been hankering for -- a cloud service similar to EC2, except with a different set of strengths. Amazon's strong point is b

You're pretty close to something I've been hankering for -- a cloud service similar to EC2, except with a different set of strengths. Amazon's strong point is being able to scale up and down easily. A lot of businesses don't need that; they just want to be able to move some or all of their operation to a cloud. And they don't necessarily want to host their own private cloud. They want to rent one, like you do with EC2, but without the "you can scale fast" premium that Amazon charges. There are other services (Grid-something, etc.) but last I looked, they were still expensive and had other drawbacks. This needs to be simple, and simpler than most of what I've seen. You need to be able to get onto the boxes if you need, but also manage them with a webapp. Bonus points: implement security features like virtual networks in my private cloud, so that I can keep my DB servers off of the internet (even though they're technically on the internet). I want to do this easily and without hand-configuring the boxes. Amazon has something like this, but the last time I looked, they were the only ones.