I have been following Amazon’s EC2 system for a couple months now. Been looking for an excuse to try it out. Now that Agent Scoreboard is live I needed to find a new Linux server to develop on and figured this would be the perfect project. If you haven’t heard of EC2 before it is a great concept. You pay for the processing and bandwidth that you need. For instance if you need a server for just a couple hours to test some new software or do some computing you can spin one of for those couple hours and then shut it down when you are finished. No setup charges, just $0.10 an hour per instance plus bandwidth. This is perfect for sites where they may need a couple extra web or database servers running for a couple hours during their peak times. You can choose from a basic Linux install, customize a basic one and store it for later use or upload an image from your own Linux box.