"I agree with all of the commenters who believe that Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (the name's a bit much), AKA EC2, is a Big Deal. The very idea of provisioning a server with expandable storage in the cloud for almost an order of magnitude less cash than it would cost to obtain a dedicated server - let alone run your own - is impressive enough on its own. Pair that with some of the available web services and it's that much more interesting."
(Via Planet Intertwingly.)
It was interesting reading first hand experience of people using this service. This service is impressive in just that you have a machine running in a cloud. But pair that with the fact that its a dedicated server with you deciding what services to run on it, and it makes it even more interesting. Though I've read in other places, that its not as cheap as some dedicated server offerings. But this is just the first incarnation of the service. It will be interesting to see how this service evolves, and if it gets cheaper with time.