Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services is now offering a lot of web services including compute power, storage, datebase and other services.

What's the most attractive selling point? I think is the pay-only-for-what-you-use policy. Here is the introduction for the AWS.

The cost-effective IT alternative
With Amazon Web Services, you pay only for what you use, with no up-front expenses or long-term commitments. To get started, you simply sign up for an account and deploy your first application. AWS manages the infrastructure that enables you to deploy highly scalable and reliable IT solutions.

No contracts or commitments – With AWS, all it takes to sign up is a credit card. And all it takes to cancel is to close your account online. There are no pre-purchase commitments required, and there is no minimum amount of use required.

Pay as you go – You pay only for what you use, no more, no less.

Transparent pricing – Our rate cards are published for everyone to see and there are no hidden fees.

Better economics – As the number of applications running in our cloud increases, the operations, management, and hardware costs to Amazon are amortized over more users. When we enjoy the economies of scale, we pass those savings onto you in the form of lower prices.

Better use of your time – Doing the heavy lifting of running IT infrastructure does not differentiate your business from your competition. Running your infrastructure on AWS enables you to focus your energies and expenses on running your business and adding value for your customers – instead of crawling around your datacenter.

Better environmental impact – From the way we build our datacenters, to the innovative technologies we use to cool and power our hardware, to the inherent green benefits of sharing reusable resources with a global network of customers, Amazon Web Services enables you to maintain a smaller environmental footprint, without sacrificing the scale and flexibility your business demands.