>> Right. So if you turn on an instance and it doesn't do anything, it 
>> will still cost you hundreds of dollars per month?
> 
> 72 dollars a month, roughly.  Why would you turn it on and not have it 
> do something?  The point of being able to turn it on and off is to run 
> it only when you have something for it to do.

If you want to use it just for yourself, sure. If you want it to provide 
a service to other people... well, no way to know when those service 
requests will arrive, eh?

> If you want to serve static web pages, use S3, not EC2.

S3 only stores data. There's no way of accessing it from the outside 
world again. (As far as I can tell.)

I'd actually like to run custom CGI. But paying 72$/month for a server 
that gets maybe 4 hits per month seems... excessive.

>> Faster than my current dual-core AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ 2.2 GHz with 
>> brass knobs on.
> 
> No. Probably slower than that at the low end, potentially faster than 
> that at the high end. ("Low end" being the $0.10/hour and high end being 
> $0.80/hour.)
> 
> On the other hand, you can turn it on, run it for three hours to do the 
> render, and turn it off again.

Three hours does not concern me. I have an animation running that's 
likely to take about a week to render. But it'll take way longer if I 
can only have the machine turned on for a few hours a day. (Especially 
since POV-Ray takes about 30 minutes JUST TO FIGURE OUT WHERE IT LEFT OFF!!)

>> The advantage of a virtual machine, of course, is that it can run 
>> overnight.
> 
> Yep. And turn off when it's done.  Just remember to save the output.
> 
> I have code for managing all this I haven't packaged up elegantly, but 
> that's what it's intended for.

Looks like you'd need to script it to run POV-Ray, run VirtualDub, 
somehow copy the data to S3, and then automatically shut down ASAP 
before you go bankrupt!

The more I look at this, the more infeasible it looks.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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