Some time ago I came across the Amazon WEB Services but I did not do anything about it. Recently for one reason or another I have revisited AWS offerings. It’s not so much AWS but more so the EC2 product that is so interesting.
Using the CE2 services that AWS have on offer allows you to have hosted servers. These hosted servers can be anything at all. So what I hear you saying. The big deal is that you only pay for the time the server is operating, typically around US10 cents per hour. Not only that you can configure load balancing, clustering and more. This is ideal for test environments as you can quickly and easily bring up 5 or 10 images (instances as EC2 call it) and do what you need to test a particular feature or function.
I’m currently in the process of documenting the process that I have taken on my Wiki. I have created an AWS category that may be worth a look.
My plan is to get Asterisk hosted and have a play. I am thinking of building an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to host on the EC2 and offering paid support.