I have two applications that I need to run continuously to process data. 1.) An app that processes and aggregates information from sources 2.) A mapreduce workflow* that processes the above info I've thought about either getting vps hosting or getting my own inexpensive server and using xen to split the resources of the server. Getting a quad core box with 2 GB of Ram seems a lot cheaper than the grid options I've seen at slicehost, rackspace and others...