As Joyeur suggests,¹ EC2 isn’t an uber-scalable webhost yet,²³ but it does present some incredible possibilities for the data processing side of web applications. Several of my product ideas hinge on a significant amount of back-end processing, for rendering things from data definitions to picture and movie formats. Scaling that sort of problem with the standard web setups is expensive, but when you can parallelize it on the cheap you’ve hit gold.

1. Joyent, of course, has good reason to tell us that EC2 isn’t ready for scalable web hosting, as they build a competing product … but their article is still a worthy read ↩
2. Though I can see ways to apply EC2 to the Rails-Mongrel proxy problem ↩
3. And with management front-ends, scalable web serving is possible ↩