Good article and quantified my own take, making me feel justified for setting up RAID0. Lately, I have spent 5 to 10 hours a week doing setup/experiments on EC2 + EBS (about half on customer projects, and about half for my own stuff). I expect (hope!) that this time spent per week will decrease drastically since although I have been having a lot of fun, this is time spent not doing development.

I continue to be a big fan of Heroku because it saves me so much time, but I have been having limited success getting customers to go with Heroku - they seem to want to pay for custom EC2 setups.

BTW, one huge advantage of running on EC2 is that it is so easy to run an old version of a system to test against. I moved my own reserved instance from booting on an ephemeral drive (out of S3) to booting off of EBS. I only deployed what I currently need, and will always have the old version around to test against, check a bootup script, etc.