Why I Dislike EC2
On top of paying 8x what it cost before/after I moved from/back to Softlayer, AWS services just didn't work right. EBS failed often. RDS, which runs on top of EBS, would fail often too. When an entire AZ failed, despite paying double the hourly rate for "Multi-AZ" instances that were supposed to automatically fail over to another zone, nothing failed over, it just failed.<p>If I need on-demand instances these days, I'll do it at Linode. They bill to the day, so you don't need to commit to a month for temporary instances. It's not as scriptable, but it works and doesn't cost a fortune over renting hardware either. More often, I just get servers with more CPU cores and more RAM than I need so there's plenty of room to absorb spikes.