A lot of the commentary on cloud deployments talks about scaling from 1 to n servers easily and dynamically (and from n to n-1, etc.) In practice, partly due t

A lot of the commentary on cloud deployments talks about scaling from 1 to n servers easily and dynamically (and from n to n-1, etc.) In practice, partly due to the pricing model, it seems the primary market is actually for 0 to 1 server, not 1 to n. New hosting products in the Rails space like Heroku and the new cloud pricing at Engine Yard seem to support this observation. Also, there's the idea that some services don't need to be on 24/7 or that the usage is extremely bursty. Cloud deployment could be very cost effective in those cases if managed correctly.