Unless you have need for elastic storage and compute power why would you use it?

it's convenient, provides a server with an image in seconds, you can start/stop the servers just like that, and it only bills what you use. It also seems to work fast when you're running things. I'm just going to move my blog to this I think...

the main thing I'm going to start doing is, if I'm developing something, instead of making a subfolder on a shared account then going to the 'control panel' and adding a mysql user, db, etc., and so forth, just spin up an EC2 instance and have an 'insulated' virtual server like that

I haven't used amazon web services since trying out S3 in like 2006 I didn't quite understand that you can have a generic linux environment and continue developing like usual on their system

Unless your doing large scale dev (i.e. HADOOP MapReduce) I can't see any way to save money over plain old VPS hosting. As for ease of operation/start-up you can build your app on traditional VM images for windows or linux and host them via VPS. This has the added advantage of being easy to move to a new hoster or to move in house.

yeah I'll have to see how the costs work out when I move my blog to it

I use Rackspace cloud in preference to Amazon Cloud. I struggled a bit with Amazon Cloud, but Rackspace is easier, quicker and (I think) cheaper.

A base cloud server on rackspace costs £7.00 a month. That's pretty competitive I think. I've had a simple server up and running for the last 4 months, and there has been no downtime.