Amazon has made a significant and much bolder step into the web hosting arena, extending its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service by introducing Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones. The Elastic IP Addresses allow Amazon Web Services users to set up static IP addresses, making it easy to host websites, web services and other online applications using Amazon EC2. Users can programmatically map the static IP addresses to any of their instances, making it easy to recover from instance failures.

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