Yes but Amazon operates out of a datacenter that will /strive/ to be online for all but a few minutes of each year. Transient machines spread over the internet on home or office PC's /do not/ have the same operational parameter.

At this point I'm somewhat unsure of their actual business model. Are they reselling VPS instances from real providers or are they sourcing computational power from home/office PC's? This seems entirely unclear based on the reactions of this thread and the mostly ambiguous stuff written on their website.

If they are sourcing computational power SETI@home style my question remains, and I encourage it to be upvoted and answered on such a technically competent site such as this. Marketing hype is cool, but I'm still an engineer when it comes to making choices.

> Yes but Amazon operates out of a datacenter that will /strive/ to be online for all but a few minutes of each year.

Spot instances can be killed any time if your bid is too low. This will, of course, happen less often at Amazon, but the principle is the same. You must also be significantly more proactive about unreliable performance and poor security. But this may be worth it sometimes.

> At this point I'm somewhat unsure of their actual business model. Are they reselling VPS instances from real providers or are they sourcing computational power from home/office PC's?

They’re computational power scavengers :) Seems to be desktop PCs for now. Maybe in the future it would also make sense to also utilise smartphones plugged into a charger? I hope they will be successful, because unreliable and cheap computational power is a pretty cool resource, despite all of its shortcomings.