I'm thinking about EC2 for a permanent hosting place but am concerned since I have little experience - Matt Terenzio

For no related reason, I finally got around to playing with EC2 last night. It was dead simple if you follow the guide. What may not be as simple is automatically instantiating more instances in response to load -- didn't explore that yet. - Dan MacTough

my main concern is the fear of losing an instance and all the customizations to that image. I'm not up on creating a custom image so I'd have to make some custom changes to an image once it became an instance. I usually have a few machines around with similar environments in case of a catastrophic loss, so getting another server up and running is usually fairly easy (yeah right). But I need a way to do a backup of all the libraries and tools I might use. backing up the data is no problem - Matt Terenzio

I didn't go that far, but the guide made it sound really easy to save your customizations to an instance. Note, though, that you must use your own S3 account as storage for that instance, so your costs will be a bit higher. And of course every time you tweak something, you have to resave the instance and transfer it to S3. Bandwidth between EC2 and S3 is free, at least. - Dan MacTough

I truly believe that virtual is the future of hosting. the learning curve for setting up an instance is easy but you must change your general development patterns. Plus I've been on FreeBSD for years. I'm used to that. Should I bite the bullet is the real question. . . - Matt Terenzio

Sounds like a rhetorical question. - Dan MacTough