Yep, my experience with EC2 is that it gets pricey fast, and that the slower instances aren't really that speedy. The sweet spot is probably where you don't nee

Yep, my experience with EC2 is that it gets pricey fast, and that the slower instances aren't really that speedy. The sweet spot is probably where you don't need critical performance (like a database box with a really fast RAID array). My solution is to run most stuff in a colo on dell boxes running the linux-vserver kernel patch, sort of a cheap mans cloud solution.