If you haven’t heard already Amazon has been doing this for a bit. Basically rather then buying a new server you can use a nice web based service to do things for you. Add all your stuff to their servers to run and it will act as a virtual server for you. Google is offering decent amount of bandwidth, storage and processing under their free plan. Read more about it here:
This is only in beta right now and only open to the first 10k people that signed up at 9pm PST. I tried at 10:30pm and it made it sound like I missed the boat and was added to a waiting list. But mind as well get on that list now if you’re interested.