This is pretty impressive. Can somebody tell me why I should even think about EC2 at the prototyping stage?
I have some servers running java applications, some running php on apache, some running php on fastcgi+lighty, some running ruby, and some that just run memcache.
I'm interested in having more smaller projects, with a higher rate of failure. GAE seems like a good fit, would Amazon's cloud offering work too, and be more flexible?
A small amazon instance will run you about $70 a month so at that level it might be worth it to go elsewhere unless you think you will need the ability to scale up massively fast.
In that case though it might be worth getting an Amazon instance configuring it exactly how you want then saving the image and turning it off. You'll only be paying for storage of the image than which is a couple bucks a month and in the event you do need to scale up fast you can bring up the instances and swap your original box into a temporary load balancer for your amazon instances.