Alright, so I have been doing a lot of reading on Amazon EC2 (and have a lot more to do), in hopes of possibly moving my hosting off a dedicated server. Right now I'm paying significantly (~$150/m) for what is a highly underutilized server. I figure, based on the absolute dearth of CPU usage (currently averaging only 0.15 load when not running a backup), meager requirements on memory, and just a small amount of bandwidth, that it'd be worthwhile to move.

First thing, for anyone who is already hosted for me, IF I decide to go this route you will have plenty of warning, and there should not be significant downtime (it'll be done overnight). Honestly the longest bit of downtime will be the DNS changeover. But that's not what this thread is about.

I'm actually making this thread as sort of a sounding board for thoughts from the rest of you tech-savvy folks on this proposition. Since I don't know much about EC2 yet (I plan on running a free micro server first to test), any advice? Anything I should watch out for? Is this a good idea in your mind?

Frankly, there's actually several benefits in addition to being cheaper. Overall it will be far more reliable, backups will be more frequent, and we'll actually have a faster link. I'll also have an easier time managing it, with more direct control on what OS I'm running on, and keeping it up to date. I'll still have the option of CPanel (will need to license that separately) but otherwise it seems like it would be very painless.

The main benefit of cloud computing is the ability to handle unpredictable use spikes, e.g. the USGS website right after an earthquake. If your demand doesn't follow this kind of pattern I don't think it's the right choice. I'd also be very surprised if it ended up being cheaper than a traditional shared or virtual host (the only difference is that you pay by the hour - the hourly charge isn't for CPU utilization hours, it's for the wall time hours. You get billed whether you use it or not.)

Also, EC2 doesn't have a great uptime.

The price before cpanel I'd be paying for my current usage is going to be somewhere between $65 and $85 a month, depending on whether the micro would end up being enough or not. I'm looking at the reserved ones, since the pricing is more sensible for an instance that will be continuously used (as opposed to what you described).

I could possibly just transfer to a slower dedicated server host, but I'm not looking for shared hosting (where the storage costs alone would be laughable). Another benefit though of EC2 is that I'd save significantly on backups. The transfer alone is actually somewhat devastating, so something integrated like the EC2 snapshots would be a pleasant change. I would likely save even more money just on transfer rates alone for the backups.

I'll admit I'm not sold on EC2 either, but it seemed like a worthwhile look. If EC2 doesn't pan out, I'll probably pick up a lower end server from our current datacenter the next time they run a sale.

I actually just set up an account today as a part of a cloud computing class I'm taking (they gave us some credit so we don't have to pay for reasonable course related usage).

Unfortunately I have nothing yet to contribute to the thread as I am this very moment sitting in the class and clearly browsing massassi instead of paying attention

I can't really speak to the cost of EC2 (we get billed at work for all AWS), but we've been running several Ubuntu EC2 instances at 6500+ hours now (smalls and mediums).

We use them at work too, from what I can understand it can get expensive.