performance of handling many inserts into an Amazon RDS instance; are there other options?

I am looking at using Amazon RDS for MySQL. However, the performance has not been acceptable. Using SQLite, I get about 1000 inserts per second whereas on Amazon RDS, I'm getting about 5 inserts per second(!) - granted a micro instance but is there another service that is more performant? We do an initial data load and there really isn't a workaround. Would Google, Rackspace, or ClearDB perform better?