>> And I'm also wondering just how much all this stuff actually *costs*...
> 
> CPU hours are a bit expensive, but comparable to renting a shared server 
> somewhere else (except you get a "dedicated" server). The rest is really 
> cheap.  Hit aws.amazon.com for details.

Well now... It seems that even if you store some absurd amount of data 
like 1GB (think how many years that would take to upload...) it costs 
less than 50p/month. Which is nothing. (I currently pay £5/month.)

On the other hand, 30 days of instance time on EC2 is almost 80$. 
Exchange rates vary, but this compares wildly unfavourably with my 
current hosts' demands of £15/month.

The verdict: S3 is very, very cheap. EC2 is absurdly expensive. (If 
you're a company, the reliability guarantees and lack of initial outlay 
could make sense. But for an individual, it's a no-brainer: don't do it!)

For about £200 you could *buy* a half-decent PC. If you leave it running 
for 1 year, it will have cost you [slightly more than] £200. If you run 
EC2 for 1 year, it will cost 964.15$, which I would suggest is slightly 
more than £200, whatever the exchange rate is.

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