If you thought Amazon’s S3 or SQS was interesting then Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is going to blow you away.
Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.
The images mentioned are stored on S3 (penny drops.)
This is the link between S3 and SQS I’ve been waiting for (without really knowing it.)
If I have my sums right you could run one server doing 1gigabyte an hour for 365 days for only $2,628. AFAIK that is incredibly cheap (for the bandwidth being used.)
I’ve got my beta account and am going to get into EC2.
