[binaryfinery]

That's why I use google appengine. It would have handled what you describe without even going over the daily free limit. Of course, you wouldn't be cool as rails.

[gcv]

You could be cool as Clojure, though: https://github.com/gcv/appengine-magic

[binaryfinery]

Whats the start-up time? i.e. when google spins up a new instance to handle traffic, how quickly can it come up?

[gcv]

In the free configuration, I've clocked it between 4 and 6 seconds. (Sometimes up to 10 seconds, but not recently.) With the 1.4.0 release of the App Engine SDK, the cold start time has become less important, though. First, you can pay $9/month to have three instances running all the time. Second, App Engine can send a "warmup" request to your application.