Amazon EC2/S3 Opinions

LizardKing

LizardKing

LizardKing

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
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Location
The Land of Roundabouts
Anyone have experience/opinions on this?

Were looking at reducing our costs and one of the options is moving our hosting from rack space onto this or at least some of it, being very sceptical I'm pretty much against the idea and would rather look at more conventional hosts. But i've had a play with it today and i have to admit i'm rather impressed with the amount of functionality you get for very little money in comparison to RackSpace.
 
I've only used it a bit but since you haven't had any other replies, I thought I'd give my input...

Reliability is good. One outage in the 10 months I've had a server running there.

I don't like the fact that an instance has its disk destroyed if you shut it down. You can copy it to ebs (persistent storage) or have an ebs volume mounted and store data there but this all needs configuring.

Disk io speed is ok but not great.

The static IP addresses you get assigned can be in rbl's (presumably because other EC instances are sending out spam) so that could be an issue if you want to use it as an mta.

No rdns at present.

They're bringing out (might be out already) a clustering option so you can easily bung a group of EC instances into a single cluster.

Let me know if you've got any specific questions.

You might want to look at rightscale.com for creating and managing your amazon instances.
 
Cheers accod
That was the big downside (loosing the instance if its shut down), i think it may be big enough to put us off all together :D, it may only be a small chance of it every being shut down but there is still that chance.
I cant see a reason why they would do that other than forcing you into using the s3 service, which is stupidly cheap anyhow :confused:

I'll take a look at rightscale :)

I like the idea of being able to just create a server and have it functioning in 10minutes though, even if we dont use them for hosting i can see this being handy for demo/development sites etc.
 
I'm not sure if vps.net is true utility computing - it may be a "cloud", but you pay for instances monthly, I believe. Whereas with EC2 and other similar systems, you pay for your instances hourly. I know that Flexiscale have a similar system in the UK - they had some teething issues in the beginning (what new system doesn't?) but they seem to be on top of things lately. There's also ElasticHosts who are in the UK and again, have a similar system. The problem is at the moment that the UK pricing of utility/cloud computing platforms are just as high if not higher than renting some physical hardware. Whilst you are limited in some ways when you have physical hardware, you'll typically get better disk I/O.
 
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