* so they are alive in that these images are frozen in time, but one takes a copy and can then evolve it into a new version of the image.

* i do see with two 2GB ram instances running, it has very little ram left -- which means the webapp itself and it's components do take a substantial amount of memory, which is a pain. one possibility is to run the control part of the node in a separate VM somewhere and leave this host to do pure host service. it may still be the case that the control VM would require a lot of resources, however, but we don't know how much.