As a TFS consultant, I need to know everything there is to know about the product.  I really didn’t want to spend $1,000+ on hardware to have it running all the time, so I looked into using Amazon Web Services.  I had a little trepidation because I really didn’t know how much money it was going to cost me, but I figured “what the heck” and gave it a try.  Here are my results or more specifically my first month’s bill:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
US East (Northern Virginia) Region
	Amazon EC2 running Windows
		$0.12 per Small Windows Instance (m1.small) instance-hour (or partial hour)	1 Hrs	0.12
		$0.48 per Large Windows Instance (m1.large) instance-hour (or partial hour)	16 Hrs	7.68
	Amazon EC2 EBS
		$0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage	18.569 GB-Mo	1.86
		$0.10 per 1 million I/O requests	5,159,946 IOs	0.52

This comes out to $10.18, which really isn’t that bad.  I tried the small instance first, but it didn’t have enough RAM, so I went with the more costly Large Instance.  This was plenty of firepower.  As I recall, it had about 6 GB of RAM and multiple cores.  I put SharePoint 2010, TFS 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2 on it and everything ran smoothly.  I am thinking of bundling the Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) to make it easier for others to get started.  Please contact me or leave a comment if you’re interested.