Using EC2 for anything but overflow is silly. The costs are extraordinarily high if you are doing decent volume ( read- if you have more than 3-5 servers )<p>Bandwidth is ridiculously expensive with them. You can get 3-4x cheaper per megabit going dedicated.<p>Servers are crazy expensive. Compare the most powerful machine they have vs something on 10tb / gigenet / theplanet for the price. You will definitely end up with a more powerful machine for half the price on either.<p>The only real advantage to using ec2 is the hourly billing. Make its perfect for overflow, but thats about it. I read about alot of startups that use ec2 for things like webservers or other servers that have 100% reliance.<p>Dont get me wrong. Some of Amazons offerings are great. The CDS and S3 can take the bullshit out of dealing with the complexitys of each and might save you a network engineer or 2. However, for EC2 there is no excuse. Its no more difficult to setup a normal dedicated server than it is a EC2 box.<p>/endrant