Can anyone think of any ways to collect data on just how big AWS really is? So far it seems like everyone is just trying to infer based on the "other" line of their revenues and anecdotes from the cloud community.
Zonefiles are downloadable.
If you can get a comprehensive list of AWS/Amazon ASNs, you could also hit up the CIDR Report: http://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/
The rabbit I haven't been able to pull from a hat yet is getting that list of ASNs without a fair bit of legwork.
I guess you'd need to crawl the web and look for those headers. Or maybe you could look at IP addresses? It would certainly be difficult to do with any kind of accuracy but you could probably get some decent estimates if your sample size was large enough.
Rendering web pages is actually one of the worst use cases for Amazon from a bang-for-the-buck perspective, especially when you factor in bandwidth.
When people are building 30,000 core compute clusters [1] on EC2 - presumably with zero publicly available web servers, I'd be very interested in any methodology that provides reasonable estimates of revenue based on public web servers.
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/09/30000-core-clus...
That's likely only if you use Amazon's Linux distribution (based on CentOS). My EC2 instances say "Server: Apache/2.2.17 (Ubuntu)".
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Somewhat out-of-date (Aug, 2011) but a useful estimate.