Amazon (and others) will sell you time on a massive grid. Amazon's is called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and it seems like it might be a good alternative to a

Amazon (and others) will sell you time on a massive grid. Amazon's is called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and it seems like it might be a good alternative to a VPS -- the elasticity of each instance would be a boon to a quickly growing web service. I am currently developing my startup's software on a dedicated server running FreeBSD, and I am paying some attention to making it so it will scale (probably in a load balanced cluster). To this end, I have set up FreeBSD jails (low overhead chrooted full installs) so that I can test splitting up the application in various ways. I would imagine that a transparent grid system would reduce the need to worry about scalability issues for many uses.