Question

I would like to be able to give someone a “bundle” of software to be able to host anywhere. Is there a way to do this so that the person is charged by Amazon for the amount of time that they used but does not have to deal with setting up an EC2 account and installing an image?

Also, it doesn’t have to be EC2. What I am looking for a way for people to host their own cloud service.

Answer 1

I’ll split your question into two parts:

1. Not requiring your customer to set up an account on EC2 (or whatever)
2. Not having to install an image

For the first, I don’t think you’ll be able to find a solution where the person who is to be charged by the host provider can be charged without setting up an account!

For the second, I think you are mainly concerned about the annoyance of your customer having to do a full image install and then configure your software package into that image… VM/VPS setup can be a chore.

If this is the case, you can simplify this a lot by pre-preparing a full VM that has an OS installed as well as your fully configured software and support packages. Then simply give your “someone”/customer the entire VM as one .iso file and they can host it at http://www.elastichosts.com quite easily. ElasticHosts lets you set up completely arbitrary VMs, unlike most (all?) other VPS providers that currently limit you to a selection of OS images that you then need to install your software into.

I don’t think you can get any easier, unless I completely misunderstand your question.