How about this idea, a 'friends of HN server' ?
_pius: I love the idea, but agree with others who say it seems like it'd be a tremendous amount of work to manage.One approach, given the extant free options like Heroku and GAE, would be to focus on what is actually difficult to get for free: various daemons, queues, fast key-value stores, etc.  Maybe provide a RESTful interface to provision common cases on demand.  That'd be helpful to a lot of people without overlapping too much with existing options or allowing people to execute arbitrary code.Of course, implementing this is probably a business idea all in itself and may take way more time than you'd want.