Amazon EC2 for hosting

[cpd]

Curious if anyone has looked into Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for hosting services? It seems like a great setup. Cheap computing and bandwidth, the ability to create any type of server you want, and to instantly drop in/take out servers based on load need.

I'm going to investigate further as it looks like for large-scale domaining projects, this might be the way to go.

 

[Stanley]

We've done some tests with EC2 and S3 a few weeks ago and we found that neither service is as cheap as it seems.
I would recommend sitting down with a calculator and crunching some estimates of your storage and bandwidth requirements before you sign up for their service.
Personally, S3 is a viable solution if you plan to experience bandwidth spikes from time to time. Otherwise, as a permanent host, traditional servers are far cheaper.

 

[cpd]

Good advice, thanks. The thing that initially attracted me to it is the ability to drop in differently configured servers. I have some sites now that run on RubyOnRails, some straight up web servers, some MySQL boxes, and it would be nice to be able to easily configure more web servers if I needed, or if I wanted a sandbox MySQL machine I could do that.

I'll crunch out the numbers between this and actually buying a few dedicated hosted boxes.

 

[sleepylee]

Certainly if you're looking for a development server then it might be very good value. Turn it on when you need it. Turn it off again once you're done. As long as you can ensure it's configured exactly the same each time... which I think you can.

I've got a friend who has done a lot of development work with EC2 for some large organisations - if anyone is interested in hooking up with him for a chat then let me know.