Cloud computing on Amazon or alternative platforms

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Most of my business and non-profit ideas revolve around a website with a database. I am ready to start making prototypes (one is a clearinghouse for autism research and evidence-based decision making). Wrong Planet is one of these. I like the idea of doing it on the cloud because then it can unexpectedly grow and still work (for instance if Oprah or Obama take notice of it). So I found Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS) and Amazon Web Services. They are free for the first year, and then there is no minimum monthly fee, so it could easily be 33 cents per month. I like working with really big companies because they are more likely to be around a long time and use at least some principles of backward compatibility when they make changes (which drive me crazy even in computer land). Amazon provides free books on the Kindle for instructional manual and getting started guide (another plus).

Am I missing anything big. Are there any great alternatives out there for a cloud-based database and web hosting service? And is anybody super interested and knowledgeable about Amazon RDS or any other cloud development services? I would love to connect and grow and do business together.

Hmm.....on Friday I downloaded Gantt Project (essentially to organise my thesis) & there are other applications as well. GanttProject is desktop tool for scheduling & project management, runs on Windows, Linux & Mac - open source. http://alternativeto.net/software/ganttproject/

Based on my personal experience Godaddy is medium ranged. Their prices are slightly higher than the common $4 p/mo hosting shops but a lot less than the premium $30+ p/mo hosting companies. I pay about $8-9 p/mo to host my sites on their servers. They're done a good job of migrating my sites to high bandwidth server clusters, but I don't use their servers for content delivery. The bulk of that is handled by Amazon's CDN. I use Amazon's Cloudfront to serve over 12GB worth of files hosted on Amazon's Simple Storage Solution (S3). Cloudfront serves those files to two of my sites ( http://www.gamemusicjukebox.com/default.live.asp and http://www.kxmode.com/U7map/). Total cost last month for hosting and delivery: $1.86

Very very cheap, but a great service.