Feedback needed -Pay as You go Virtual Cloud Servers - Is there a need in Education?

[VeryPC]

Today at VeryPC I've been putting the finishing touches to our latest iteration of our Service and product roadmap.

 

The most exciting development in the portfolio (yet to be branded or given a cool name is...) is our - On-demand virtual cloud server product .

 

Essentially this is our version of Amazon EC2 located on servers on 2 datacentre sites in London and Portsmouth.

 

The concept is that you as an IT admin sometimes require a server but do not have capital , server resource, rackspace, power, cooling or only need to provision a server for a small period of time.

 

Using the service you could create single or multiple virtual servers based on a template OS or even your own image on VeryPC's server farm and pay for what resource you use/need. The more GHz , RAM , Storage or Bandwidth you allocate/server the more the monthly cost.

 

Can anyone provide feedback on experience or opinions of using virtual cloud servers in Education? Barriers to use? Security issues? Budget Issues? Level of support required?

 

All feedback appreciated - It would be great to get a good discussion going .

 

An example of the type of service and platform is Cloud Hosting | Linux + Windows | Web Hosting | High Performance Servers .

 

 

Thanks

 

Andy