One of the problems with Amazon EC2 was the dynamic nature of the IP address that you received for each instance you started up. For development it isn’t a big problem, but for a production system you can see the problems this can cause if you instance fails for some reason. This morning Amazon announced the ability to have a static IP that is associated with your AWS account. By default a user can have up to 5 static IP addresses. The IP addresses are free of charge as long as the IP address is associated with a running instance. If the IP isn’t then there is a charge of $.01/hr. You can read more about this on the Amazon Web Services Developer site.