This article brought up an interesting point on the cost of hosting servers through cloud computing. I don't think this writer was especially tech savvy, but she/he has the right idea. For example, scaling one of the top Facebook applications can cost upwards of $30,000 a month if you use single dedicated servers, but that cost can jump all the way down to <$5,000 if you're using multiple EC2 servers of various sizes to maximize the throughput on each instance.