[Mailman-Users] Can one use EC2 for bandwidth spikes?

[Chuck Peters]

We have a newsletter with 1500+ subscribers which is currently hosted on my
friends house.  He has DSL and the connection goes to crap for 5-15 minutes
every time we send one out, other than that it works fine.  When I looked at
some of the low cost hosting options none of them seem to be good because of
various limitations like 500 messages per hour.  We send out 1 or 2
newsletters a week at most so it has been hard to justify spending the
$40-$100 or more a month for better hosting.

I have been wanting to try out Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud,
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2, and I think it would be really cool to fire up
the EC2 instance (basically a linux server) for an hour and fire off the
newsletter.
Has anyone done this sort of thing?

I doubt it could it be as simple as making a temporary exim smarthost with
some configuration tweaks.

What is required to make this work properly?


Thanks,
Chuck