That being said, the type of online service that can really benefit from something like EC2 is a service where the demand spikes a lot, were are certain times of the year were you are going to get a ton of demand, and other long periods of time were your demand is less then a tenth of your peak demand. Think of people that sell seasonal products, or something like the post office and such. In this situation EB2 gives you the real fexibility it seems to be designed for. You can quickly create more instances to handle your increased demand, and then get rid of them when your demand goes down. In this way you are not buying hardware to handles the biggest possible demand you get and you can scale up and down as needed without having servers sitting idle a lot of the time.

Interesting post. One point in your post that seems a little misleading is saying that AWS is “Not PCI compliant”. If my understanding is correct, AWS is only not PCI _Level 1_ compliant. The vast majority of web sites out there don’t require that level of compliance (which requires on-site inspections yearly). Level 2, 3, and 4 don’t require on-site inspections. Here’s a link to a description of the level differences:
http://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/pcifaqs.php#5

So in theory, as long are you’re processing less than 6 _million_ VISA transactions a year (which is probably 99.99% of web sites out there), you’re fine using AWS. I could be wrong, though :).

stevie