Patent ID: 8145765

Claim:
A method for distributing computing resources for application programs across a plurality of servers, comprising: partitioning a plurality of servers into a Web server partition and a distributed computing server partition such that each of said partitions has at least one server, each server in the Web server partition configured to serve content to requesting client systems, and each server in the distributed computing server partition capable of being provisioned in real-time to run one or more customer application programs; tracking a status of each server in the distributed computing server partition; automatically provisioning at least a particular server in the distributed computing server partition to run a customer application program, the particular server already having been provisioned with at least one other application; continuing to automatically provision the particular server with customer application programs until the particular server reaches a predetermined level of server usage; charging a fee to a customer based on usage of servers in the distributed computing server partition by customer application programs associated with the customer.