This is incorrect - you can absolutely host in EC2. Our two skills are running off of a single EC2 micro instance.

There is one really weird thing where you can't use US West to do an Amazon Lambda passthrough to your server, but as far as I know EC2 instances in any region should work for Alexa to call out to.

I'm sure that the issue can be fixed so it might have been.

But I have the mail conversation here (10 people at least and dozen of back and forth).

This was 2 months ago and I gave up on it for this specific reason.

Man, that's weird, I wonder what was different between our implementations. Our original POCs were about 4 months ago, and they were on EC2 at the time. We had plenty of other technical issues (don't get me started on SSL), but running on EC2 was never one of them.

That said, I'm curious how you managed to get an email conversation going with the team - the whole crux of the original article by Lawrence (and the forum thread which it cites) is that there's no way to have a direct conversation with anyone representing Alexa, so certification is a crapshoot.

I knew someone working at Amazon. That is why I'm reluctant to show the conversation or be more public about it at that time