I started to play with the on-demand cloud service offered by Rackspace. A few years back they started a venture called Mosso to develop cloud technologies. Earlier this year, Rackspace incorporated Mosso cloud services into their standard offerings. I was able to have a web-accessible dedicated server within minutes. You can have any OS preloaded, as long it is a major Linux distribution. Customer accounts are charged on a hourly basis for each server that is online. It does not cost much to load some servers for experimentation. I would encourage you to give it a try at http://www.rackspacecloud.com.
Over the summer, I tried loading MySQL and Java on a Ubuntu 9.04 server install. After a clean boot, most of the 256MB of memory was already allocated. In the upcoming week, I will load a complete open source LAMP stack with PHP. The objective to see if a dedicated web application server can operate effectively on the cheapest configuration.
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