I just wrote up a quick <a href="/node/36"> how-to</a> on using S3 and EC2 as a hot (or cold) LAMP box failover. I currenly have something similar running in production and am overall pretty happy with it

Tasks like this really make knowing (and learning) bash extremely helpful. I'm no ninja but there is a certain satisfaction being able to rock SED, AWK, XARGS and cook up some RegEx patterns.