Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.
I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.
Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
Since Amazon has an open API for its s3 Simple Storage Service, other cloud vendors (and even YOU) can spin up a similar service.http://blog.stone-head.org/s3tools-simple-storage-service-for-non-amazon-providers/
Rudy Godoy shows how you can use s3tools in Linux to tap into s3-like services both at Amazon and elsewhere.
You can use Amazon Web services free for a year, and I'm pretty darned interested in doing I did just that.
I wouldn't say signing up for Amazon Web Services was easy, or that you don't need to possess a certain level of geeky experience, because you do. But if you know a minimum about how a Linux server goes together, you can do it.
One thing to note: Ubuntu is HUGE in the world of AWS. This is an area where it looks like they are either dominating, or well on their way to dominating.
I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 as the distribution for my Amazon EC2 server.