The Amazon Web Services Developer Connection has an 18 minute screencast that will show you how to Set up and Run Amazon EC2 from Windows. EC2 is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud web service. With EC2 you can setup and run your own virtual server for less than $80 per month. It is pretty clear to me that this is going to be a huge paradigm shift in the way that website hosting is done in the future.
Granted, not everybody is going to host their own personal blog in the Cloud starting tomorrow, but we can be absolutely sure that the cost for this service will be dropping dramatically in coming years. If Amazon can make it easier for smaller e-commerce providers to both understand and successfully implement EC2 this looks set to be an enormous new business for Amazon.
