The Amazon EC2 service is a rather revolutionary cloud computing system that came out in late 2006. It provides a fairly flexible infrastructure that allows you to launch application servers on demand. Traditionally new web companies are forced to pay for rather expensive co-location facilities for their servers, with little or not thought given to scalability (which isn't always a bad thing, considering most companies never reach a point where they need scalability). That being said, for a company that either requires scalability, or is looking for new ways to reduce costs, Amazon EC2 might be ...