I recently tried this on EC2. Here is a pricing link
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
The 'Cluster Eight Extra Large' at $2.4 per hour
  +Trace Time: 0 hours  5 minutes 49 seconds (349.450 seconds)
  +using 32 thread(s) with 1116.588 CPU-seconds total
The 'High-CPU Extra Large' at $0.66 per hour
  +Trace Time: 0 hours 15 minutes 28 seconds (928.374 seconds)
  +using 8 thread(s) with 3013.769 CPU-seconds total
At home i5 quad core 3.5Ghz (3.9 Turbo) desktop
  +Trace Time: 0 hours  7 minutes 48 seconds (468.474 seconds)
  +using 4 thread(s) with 901.348 CPU-seconds total

Using 'cat /proc/cpuinfo' shows that the virtual cores are:
Xeon E5506 @2.13GHz
cache size: 4096 KB

This performance is a little disappointing, but there is no reason more
instances cant be spooled up rendering different parts of a scene with things
like 'Start_Row', but that gets pricey. I might use this in the future for a
large project i dont want to run on my desktop, but it wont be to make the
render faster.

Nothing special is needed to run on these Ubuntu 12.04 boxes, this is the
command i ran to install pov 3.7 (if i missed some dependencies, config will
tell you what they are)
I've shortened the povray link to prevent line break issues in posting.
It links to
http://www.povray.org/redirect/www.povray.org/beta/source/povray-3.7.0.RC6.tar.gz
=====
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libtiff-tools g++ libtiff4-dev libjpeg-dev libpng++-dev
libpthread-stubs0-dev libboost-all-dev make
wget http://goo.gl/inBqf
..../configure
make install
=====

From there its all normal, though you get charged any time the box is running,
so dont 'write code' on it. Write at home and push to the box.
Also, the billing counts partial hours as full, so that 5 minute test render
cost $2.40, i could have doubled the resolution and gotten billed the same.

Hope this was informative

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