After having tried small Amazon EC2 instances at work with no problems am now looking at micro instances at home. Found that a number of apps I’d installed on top of the default Amazon Linux – MySQL/postfix were failing even with very little activity. It was only then Googling that I found that these minimally resourced machines have no swap memory configured by default, so those apps needing burst of more memory can fail. Happily, following the instructions in Amazon EC2 Micro Instance Swap Space – Linux has fixed this. Lots of folk recommend *not* using micro instances for production systems for anything other than light use. Still the price is right (free tier for first year) so will keep dabbling