Since my dedicated servers are hosted at a "normal" hosting service, I wonder if there is a really cheap way to extend the server farm with AWS instances. E.g. it seems to be a effient and flexible solution with data storage and ressources for ocassional data processing, too. However, it might be very in-efficient to mix two data centres and transfering data from current webhoster to amazon and vice-versa. In my case, the traffic for this continuous data exchange seems to be expensive and the delay for moving the data back to the hoster leads into a lack or delay.

How are best practises for mixing non-aws and aws systems?

E.g.: How to move the hosters data to aws as log file storage to run urchin analysis and/or port the log file data into a bigtable for exhausting analysis there. After working with the data: how to bring it back to the hoster and use the data with the webservers there? I am not going to move all the server farm to amazon, only "separate" parts or tasks if the transfer/exchange does not lead to increased cost.