I have long been eyeing Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, but now the pieces have fallen into place:
  • For a while now, it has been possible to run Windows servers, which wasn't possible earlier.
  • They now have a nifty web-based control panel in place, so you don't have to download third party software or learn command line utilities in order to manage your server instances at EC2.
  • The Elastic Block Storage (EBS) provides, in effect, flexible persistent virtual hard drives which you can attach to any server instance. These volumes are supposed to be resistant to failure of any individual hardware component.
  • With a click of a button, it is now possible to bundle a Windows server instance, which saves its state and allows it to be relaunched later in the same configuration if it crashes, or to launch multiple clones of a server.
Before Amazon EC2, I also tried GoGrid, but I have not been as impressed. I would explain what's wrong with GoGrid, but they make you agree to a "Beta Agreement" during the signup process, where they essentially prevent you from discussing anything you experienced while using their service. Convenient, eh?

So, we've long been hosting our downloads on Amazon S3, and starting from yesterday, our main web server is now on Amazon EC2. Here's to hoping things continue to go well.

Finally: given how much I've been criticizing hosting companies, it would be wrong not to mention Cari.Net - the one dedicated server hosting company where we have so far not had any problems. Minimal down time, and the one server we have had with them has been working fine for a number of years.

Let's hope I didn't just jinx it. :)