Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) is a nice idea, but it's important not to overlook the "elastic" in the name. If there's an obvious temporal pattern to your service's usage (examples: 1. it could easily consume 100% CPU of 5 machines between 7 am and 11 am, but slow to a dawdle for the rest of the day, or 2. a large system could lie unused on weekends and holidays), and you design your application with parallelism in mind, this could be a cost effective strategy for hosting the service. As they bill you per "instance-hour" (loosely defined as an "instance" available for all - or part of - an hour), an available _idle_ instance will cost the same in a month as an available _fully-utilised_ instance. Costs start to fall as soon as you turn off your under-utilised instances dynamicall; which is something you can't yet do when renting physical space in a data center (AFAIK).
For small business without the need for elasticity (note: does that spell "unsuccessful"?), I'm not convinced it would be as cost effective as renting some tin in a data center and running multiple virtualized instances on some technology like Hyper-V, ESX or Xen.
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