Originally Posted by Babaganoosh

Fris, look into Amazon's AWS for him. I've moved all of my mainstream stuff to AWS and love it.

I moved a client who runs a medium-sized food company over to AWS after their old host kept having issues. Now they're geographically load-balanced, redundant and the pictures in their catalog are served via a true CDN. It costs about what they were paying their old host too.

They have a big traffic surge around the holidays (people ordering fruitcakes, gingerbread houses, etc). The last two years they had downtime, slowdowns, db issues and other assorted horseshit. This year everything stayed up and was smoking fast. The owner thinks I am a God now.

Your friend can probably get by on a micro instance for little or no money at all if his load/traffic is small enough. Paying you for your time will likely be his only cost.