It’s amazing what you can do with services like Amazon’s EC2 these days. Why run a server at home or a local copy when you can fire up an instance on Amazon and pay cents to use it. It also makes it easy to test server configs, practice sys-admin skills, etc. Screw something up, just restart a new instance.

I just started up an instance to do some scratch development on.
I’m configuring an instance with the tools I want on it, configured the way I want.

I save the AMI and it’s always there for me to use. I can hack some code and not worry about affecting other people like I would on a shared host environment.

It would also make a great teaching environment. I wonder if any schools are using it to give students their own servers to play with.