>> 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?
> 
> Sure. Then it's doing something.

Perhaps you're missing my point. I get charged for running the server 
24/7, when it only gets maybe 3 hits per month. That's really expensive, no?

>>> 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.)
> 
> It serves any file there via HTTP, with a URL like
> http://s3.amazon.com/mybucket/myfile.zip
> or some such.

Interesting. It appears from the documentation that the contents of a 
bucket cannot be hierachical...

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

I have a blog, but I'm not very happy with it. I'd like to write my own 
blog engine and run that. (In Haskell, naturally.)

>> Three hours does not concern me. I have an animation running that's 
>> likely to take about a week to render.
> 
> That's a pretty good use of it.

But would it be cheaper to buy a new Intel Core i7 and run it on that? 
(Once I've bought it, I can use it endlessly for nothing.)

>> 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!
> 
> Not sure what the virtualdub part involves

Transforming 6,000 frames into a single AVI so I can download it.

> but you can log in remotely, you know.

What, and be charged for 7 hours of computer time when the instance has 
finished rendering and is just sitting there waiting for me to tell it 
to transcode the video? :-P

> Posting the stuff up to S3 isn't hard either. I can give you a 
> script that pushes a directory up to S3 if you want, too.

I guess the fun part is if an instance "fails" during a render. 
Apparently it can do that. No refunds...

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

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