EC2 can be cost effective if your traffic throughout the day spikes A LOT.
As for the experimenting part, you could build yourself your own VM cluster. There are a lot of prepackaged solutions such as oVirt which come with the full administration suite and some even come with the preconfigured OS. It really isn't very complicated and you get predictable performance on modern hardware.
As for the experimenting part, you could build yourself your own VM cluster. There are a lot of prepackaged solutions such as oVirt which come with the full administration suite and some even come with the preconfigured OS. It really isn't very complicated and you get predictable performance on modern hardware.