As a slight tangent: for other purposes, one of the significant differences (not mentioned in other comments) is elastic block store (EBS) and free access to S3

As a slight tangent: for other purposes, one of the significant differences (not mentioned in other comments) is elastic block store (EBS) and free access to S3. There's nothing akin to EBS at slicehost. The closest I've seen out there is the 300MB/s NAS at appnexus.com (which also runs Xen VMs). It's hard to find anything like S3 (nirvanix is one, but they've had "issues" reported in the past). And sure you can access S3 from outside, but then you're paying the exact bandwidth charges you have at EC2 anyhow. Depends what you app does, S3 is not just for getting files to end users obviously. If high traffic to the internet is your biggest problem, this $199 deal seems attractive: 4GB RAM, 250GB drive, 10 terabytes bandwidth a month -- http://www.10tb.com http://www.10tb.com Getting around whatever convenience VMs provide to take advantage of something like that seems worth it in some cases. "it all depends"...