Believe it or not :) there are other uses for servers than web hosting. I can see why amazon publicise these stories, but it's probably not the idea use case.

Believe it or not :) there are other uses for servers than web hosting. I can see why amazon publicise these stories, but it's probably not the idea use case. If you're doing number crunching, where you need 100 machines to get results in an hour, and then you're going to spend 3 days thinking about the result, then EC2 is perfect - the key is that there is not cost difference between using 100 servers for one hour, and 1 server for 100 hours. Slicehost doesn't offer that. Of course for this to be useful you need a problem that can use 100 machines in parallel, but if that's the problem you have it's perfect for EC2.