Not trying to troll or anything, but in the age of services like EC2, App Engine, and Heroku, why would anyone get locked into a long term hosting contract without prior proof of "legs"?
EC2, App Engine are lock-in platforms with a price to switch that force your application in to a certain structure.
Heroku is free if you can make your stuff work with 5MB of storage.
I was thinking about integrating S3 when you use EC2, but of course you don't have to use S3.