Two days ago Amazon announced support for virtual Windows servers in their European EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) datacenter. Together with the US-East datacenter (which offers hosting of Windows systems since last fall) Amazon now offers two locations where you can run Windows servers on their cloud hosting systems.
In recent months we have been working with various cloud and VPS hosting offerings around the globe during our extensive tests of the next major release of PRTG Network Monitor. My personal opinion is that EC2 has proven to be the most robust and reliable platform. Running a monitoring system outside of your own data centers to monitor the "external perspective" of your server systems is simply a good idea. This way you will know when outages happen outside of your own network that may make it impossible for external users to access services in your LAN. It "a second perspective" on your server and you can get it cheap: Running a Windows server on the EC2 system costs as low as US$90 per month... We have prepared two knowledgebase articles that explain the installation of a full installation of PRTG 7 (=core server) as well as the installation of just a remote probe of PRTG 7 on EC2: