With cloud computing it’s different, primarily because the providers (GAE, EC2/S3, …) do not guarantee that the data you delete on your instance, is really deleted within their system. And that’s the subtle (important) difference.

One thing to take into account is the type of data, for example – as long as it’s my own website, files, etc. then there is no issue. If I run a social network and my customers upload files etc., then cloud computing is not suitable.

But the Eu could do with access to devpay and the use of a Solo card payment structure.

Pre-pay would also be good.

US privacy regulations are -according to the EU- not at the same strict level of privacy. So hosting private data in the US can bring legal troubles.

However all (if not, most) EU countries and few other (I think Canada was one of those) have similar levels of privacy regulations and therefore one can host without trouble or additional permisions.

In Spain I have not heard of any case of company being sued because of hosting in the US, however if the data privacy agency begins to look into this issue, fines of up to EUR 600.000 can be placed.

There are however different regulations in regard to working with data (or for web2 pros: UGC). I doubt this update addresses any of that. For a business from Europe EC2/S3, GAE and so on are still not usable in its current state.

But what I’d be more interested in is : have they increased the Bandwidth capacity between s3 and EC2?

At the moment, there’s no easy way to use Amazon S3+EC2 for mass video streaming ; if I’m not mistaken, the max bandwidth for a LARGE instance is about 450mb/s, which is simply not enough if you plan to stream live content to a huge audience… (it simply becomes too expensive and complicated)