Today I saw this at the AWS blog. It's really an amazing story.

They had 25,000 members on Monday, 50,000 on Tuesday, and 250,000 on Thursday. Their EC2 usage grew as well. For the last month or so they had been using between 50 and 100 instances. On Tuesday their usage peaked at around 400, Wednesday it was 900, and then 3400 instances as of Friday morning.

Now, someone please check my math here but if they ran 3400 compute nodes for one month and only used small instances that would be a $244,800 / month invoice. They don't mention bandwidth so I can't even venture a guess but let's assume it's probably not a small number.

While I am very impressed by the scale and scalability I am also very interested to know if they can actual monetize at a level that provides a good return on a $300 to $500 / hr investment + bandwidth. They built in elasticity so it can shrink as well as grow but still, the average number of AMI's this month is going to be up there! Also, I wondered what happens to Animoto when they max out the the credit card on their AWS account?

Sources:

Animoto Blog: http://blog.animoto.com/
Amazon Blog: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/04/animoto---scali.html