Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Today’s startup companies are able to launch innovative, web-based companies at a fraction of what it cost only a few years ago primarily because they don’t own their servers and they don’t manage them. They outsource that to companies that are able to take advantage of economies of scale by specializing in provisioning scalable computing and storage resources.

A prime example is recent startup Mogulus, where some 15,000 people host live 24/7 streaming tv channels. Mogulus is hosted entirely using Amazon’s EC2 (elastic compute cloud) and S3 (simple storage service) services.

More and more companies will be enjoying cost savings and decreased operational complexity without sacrificing availability and scalability thanks to elastic compute clouds.

Amazon EC2 is commonly used to run linux instances. For those interested in running .NET applications, check out this post: EC2 Amazon - QEMU Windows Images.