Amazon Web Services
May be a bit much for home and small office applications, but worth a look for medium sized office integration ... see Google.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
... As an example, assume you launch 20 instances of the Small type costing $0.085 per hour at some point in time ...
http://www.vijayp.ca/blog/2011/12/partychat-migrating-from-google-app-engine-to-ec2/
Partychat — migrating from Google App Engine to EC2
Partychat is a group chat service. By going to a web site, or sending an IM, users create virtual chat rooms. All messages sent to that chat room alias are then broadcast to all other users in that channel ...
Google’s new pricing was totally out of line; we were able to re-create similar service at about 5% of the cost of running the service on App Engine.
Boto
A major piece of functionality, have used a bit and seems to work well ... very well actually. A reason to use AWS in itself ?
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/boto
Boto is a Python package that provides interfaces to Amazon Web Services. Currently, all features work with Python 2.6 and 2.7. Work is under way to support Python 3.3+ in the same codebase.
Supports a huge number of AWS services.
