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My company would serve that for under $400 per month, and bandwidth isn't even our core focus. You can do much, much better than your current arrangement.

If I were you, I'd consider looking into the new hosting platforms built on cloud environments.

You should be able to find some online web hosts who charge per-use in a clustered environment so you don't have to bother about setting up your own EC2 servers (or whatever) yourself. Leave it to the experts as it were.

Some places to check out:
RightScale
ScaleMySite
GoGrid

My company uses a cloud hosting provider and it's been great not even thinking about architecture as our website hosting needs have grown.

I would suggest getting two full virtual servers from a hosting provider, one for your DB and one for your web/applications server. This can be based on Xen or VMware, but that doesn't doesn't matter to you. Just let the hosting provider's high-availability clustering handle things for you. Add load-balancing in only when traffic levels require it - and with the sort of traffic you are discussing, you do not need load-balancing unless your code is really bad or user requests generate some really massive computations (such as some sort of online business intelligence or analytics).

Some bigger providers in this space are here, here, here, and here. Amazon EC2, which others have mentioned, may not be a good a fit for your proposed applications, since their storage model is stateless.

I work for ElasticHosts, a UK cloud computing infrastructure which is the first globally to be based on Linux KVM.

For Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Amazon EC2, ElasticHosts, GoGrid, etc.), issues of data ownership are clear (the same as traditional VPS hosting), and there is already a valid need to standardize the basic access APIs that are used to start and stop servers on our respective cloud infrastructures. c.f.:

Amazon cloud infrastructure API
ElasticHosts cloud infrastructure API
GoGrid cloud infrastructure API

Since all these APIs achieve similar tasks, standardization would:
- Simplify the job of the ecosystem (e.g. RightScale going multi-cloud)
- Protect our enterprise customers, who are concerned about vendor lock-in.

There are serious IaaS industry discussions, including via the CCIF, to get an API which is simple, common, and works. You can read more about ElasticHosts beliefs on designing a great API for cloud infrastructure.

Good points. Hope I can address them to your satisfaction. First, as I wrote it the blog post, it is difficult to make a true apples to apples comparison. The services are different in many ways. I simply bill GoGrid as an "alternative" to EC2 with some additional features.

The $0.19/hr pricing on GoGrid is for the Pay-as-you-go plan. The comparison chart (as it is footnoted) shows pricing based on the Advanced Cloud pre-paid plan. There are other plans available as well. See Pre-Paid Plans.

Outbound transfer rates, again, this is based on a pre-paid plan (Transfer 200GB). Inbound transfer is free at all levels on GoGrid.

I guess you could set up Windows using an emulated environment (like QEMU) within an EC2 instance. But that sounds a bit complicated to me. We offer turnkey Windows deployments within the cloud. Simply put, we want users to be able to spend just a few minutes on configuring a cloud infrastructure and spending the majority of their time on their own stuff.

I personally have not benchmarked the startup times on EC2 but I'm sure that they are somewhat equal to GoGrid. I did step through the EC2 video tutorial on how to create an EC2 instance for the first time and it was an 18 minute video, but that is just a side note. No need to set up private keys or authentications. Just point and click. Oh, and we do have an API as well.

All companies will make marketing claims - even (gasp) Amazon -. My point was just to point out that there are differences. We get compared against Amazon daily and people need a framework to better evaluate the differences. Other product features that you didn't mention that are true: free hardware-based load balancing, free support, 10 free public static IPs, free VLANs via 2 NIC (WAN/LAN). EC2 might be perfect for many developers out there and I'm not arguing that. Google App Engine is great too as a "container-like" service.

And for all of you following this thread, here is a promo code for GoGrid that will get you $100 off your first GoGrid account - "GGMS". Give GoGrid a spin and see if it meets your needs. I'm not trying to be salesy here, just hoping to further explain about the product and clear up any "clouds" about it (grin - sorry).

In terms of GoGrid vs. EC2 comparisons, there are, obviously, some differences between the services. More info here.

You know, it's kind of funny. That comparison was one of the many reasons I never evaluated GoGrid. I figured, if you were that misleading in your claims there, you must be misleading in all of your other claims as well.

For example:

You assert that "1 GB RAM/1 Xeon Core server deployed for 1 hour" costs $0.10 on both GG and EC2. However, further investigation reveals that an EC2 instance actually does cost $0.10 per hour, however, a GG instance costs $0.19 per hour, or nearly 2x the cost of EC2! To ice the cake, an EC2 instance has 1.7GB of RAM, which is superior to GG's 1.0 GB--also by nearly a factor of 2x.

Also, you assert that "Outbound data transfer/GB" is $0.25 for GG and $0.17 for EC2. However, it seems that while the first GB of outbound transfer for EC2 is correctly quoted, the first GB outbound from GG is exactly 2x the price in your chart, or $0.50.

You also assert that it is impossible to deploy Windows on EC2. This is a falsehood.

You further assert that an EC2 instance can't be booted in under 5 minutes. Also false.

So if you are willing to be so generous in describing your capabilities in areas that are provably false, why should I believe any of your other marketing claims?

While this may over-simplify the Cloud Computing definition, I tried to explain and categorize the different segments within with the idea of the "Cloud Pyramid." You essentially have 3 segments: Cloud Applications, Cloud Platforms and Cloud Infrastructure. It's all broken down here.

Well, credit card transactions are a slippery slope to travel. On one side, you could allow all cards to be processed and run the risk of a spammer spawning a bunch of spam servers using a fraudulent credit card, or, on the other side you could have some sort of fraud check that may bounce some credit cards out of the acceptable threshold and then process those manually with a verbal confirmation later. We elected to do the later to ensure as much integrity as possible for GoGrid users.

In terms of GoGrid vs. EC2 comparisons, there are, obviously, some differences between the services. More info here.

Also, we recently released a REST-like API for programmatically controlling your GoGrid environment. Info here.

Sorry for the salesy-esque post but I want to be sure the record is straight here.

Well, credit card transactions are a slippery slope to travel. On one side, you could allow all cards to be processed and run the risk of a spammer spawning a bunch of spam servers using a fraudulent credit card, or, on the other side you could have some sort of fraud check that may bounce some credit cards out of the acceptable threshold and then process those manually with a verbal confirmation later. We elected to do the later to ensure as much integrity as possible for GoGrid users.

In terms of GoGrid vs. EC2 comparisons, there are, obviously, some differences between the services. More info here.

Also, we recently released a REST-like API for programmatically controlling your GoGrid environment. Info here.

Sorry for the salesy-esque post but I want to be sure the record is straight here.

There are, in fact, several web hosting companies who have already launched their own clouds with a fuller range of supporting services. For instance:

US: GoGrid, MediaTemple, Mosso

UK: ElasticHosts, FlexiScale

Absolutely agree that cloud hosting services offer significant economies over traditional hosting. While we're naming vendors, a more complete list of cloud vendors includes the following (and most offer a much fuller range of web hosting services than EC2!):

US: Amazon EC2, MediaTemple, GoGrid, Mosso, Linode, Joyent

UK: ElasticHosts, FlexiScale