Amazon Web Services has activated that offer low-cost, low-latency access to key services from the Western portion of the US. The new US West (Oregon) Region supports Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB, and other cloud services. This is AWS' seventh Region and its fourth in North America. http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/11/now-open-us-west-portland-region.html