
How and why we switched to Amazon EC2 - moritzplassnig
http://blog.railsonfire.com/2012/10/04/Switching-to-Amazon-EC2.html
======
matlock
As I was asked about the implementation details I'll write a second blogpost
at the end of the week that goes into the details of our implementation.

------
peterwwillis
If the main motivator here is price (ability to charge per hour vs per month),
and EC2 is so much more expensive than a VPS provider, have you done the math
to see if buying a couple extra VPS's for the month would not break even or be
cheaper overall? Linode is kind of pricey compared to other VPS providers.

The larger your site gets the less you're going to need to rely on "hourly"
scaling (as your traffic models also become more predictable). There's also
the question of uptime, which we've all seen is not a guarantee from just
using Amazon.

~~~
astrodust
> Linode is kind of pricey compared to other VPS providers.

Can you qualify this? The cost is lower than Amazon and Rackspace Cloud.

There are dime-store VPS providers out there that are technically less
expensive, but they're usually not able to provide the same level of service.
Linode always seems to provide exceptional customer support.

~~~
peterwwillis
Do you know how many "dime-store VPS providers" there are, and how many of
them have existed as long as Linode and longer? Linode provides a valuable,
quality service, and has lots of extras that you may not need.

Some VPS providers specialize and have a good history of both uptime and
support, and provide it for less than the big-name competitors. I've found
many to be exceptionally reliable with good support, and there are communities
where you can find reviews and status on such providers to back up their
claims.

And in the end, realistically, if you're doing small scaling by the hour you
probably don't need the biggest providers in the game. A small service
provider for a small company is often a great fit.

You can check out reviews on <http://www.lowendbox.com/> and
<http://www.webhostingtalk.com/> and compare prices, services and reputation.
In general, a standard small-sized VPS will be half the cost of Linode,
meaning you can buy double the VPS's (on different providers, for example) and
get double the capacity and redundancy for the same cost. If you spread them
out by region you can implement cheap software GeoIP load-balancing and serve
the content by servers closest to your users.

~~~
krobertson
The VPS market is crap if want to look at the low end market.

This comes from my own experience running my own small scale VPS host for a
few years, with a purposely small customer base (mostly people I knew
personally).

Look at WHT and follow it for a while. That market is crowded, a race to the
bottom in pricing AND support, and is full of drama. Some examples I've seen:

* Lack of experience in production systems with no backup procedure... some systems go down, they loose all data, entire business caves.

* Super tight margins and low capital... fall behind on a build, their provider shuts them down (most these guys are leasing dedicated servers or reselling from another provider)

* Don't know who really is in control... reselling from someone and don't know who? On dedicated servers with a provider who is known for a problematic network?

* They're some 16 year old and their dad grounds them from the computer so they can't answer support tickets.

* Don't understand the technology they're using for virtualization and get noisy neighbors, don't properly secure exploits, don't understand the inner working of their COTS control panel, etc.

* Look up the history of Lxadmin. VERY popular control panel package, company behind it, but most coding/knowledge behind the CEO. Big exploit found, 100k servers exploited, CEO commits suicide. Company is dangling. Believe licensing servers went offline. All providers using them were screwed. They were using COTS software, didn't know their own stack, left scrambling.

Stick with providers that are a real company. Employees of their own, support
staff of their own, own their own equipment, etc.

Linode is great, EC2 is great, and there are several other providers.

~~~
turar
> Linode is great, EC2 is great, and there are several other providers.

What are some of the others?

~~~
krobertson
Are you asking for a list as a counter argument? A list of ones to look at? Or
a list of companies that match my personal criteria?

Rackspace, HP Cloud, VPS.NET, Gandi, RIMU, Slicehost (back in the day),
Webbynode, Liquidweb, StormOnDemand (though a part of Liquidweb), Burst.net,
PowerVPS, FDC Servers, ...

List could go on. I usually look for whether they have an established history,
a site that doesn't look like a crappy overused template, a real physical
address, WHOIS info on the domain, Google them and research, whether they have
a real status site, maybe lookup if they have an ARIN number, traceroute to
their site, etc.

~~~
turar
>Are you asking for a list as a counter argument? A list of ones to look at?
Or a list of companies that match my personal criteria?

The last two.

------
mvkel
How do you get around the IO issue? We've been looking at EC2 for, well,
forever, but IO performance has always been a huge issue -- to the point where
it'd cost more than hosting it ourselves just to scale IO performance to the
point where it'd equal a couple self-hosted servers.

~~~
jameskilton
As it hasn't been mentioned yet, Amazon released EBS Optimized and Provisioned
IOPS a few months ago that vastly improves EBS throughput.

[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/08/fast-forward-
provisioned-...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/08/fast-forward-provisioned-
iops-ebs.html)

~~~
astrodust
Their new SSD-based instances are supposed to be a lot faster, but has anyone
benchmarked these?

My experience with EBS was the the performance was decent most of the time,
but would brown out intermittently for reasons beyond your control.

~~~
ihsw
Netflix managed to discover that the new instances cut server costs in half.

[http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/benchmarking-high-
perfor...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/benchmarking-high-performance-
io-with.html)

Keep in mind this is purely research and it may (or may not) have already been
implemented as part of their production systems.

------
ezequiel-garzon
What networking issues did you experience with Hetzner?

~~~
matlock
Builds failed from time to time because the network was simply gone. We worked
around the issues by running commands again when they timed out, but it was
one of the reasons (the main reason being that having your own servers is
simply not flexible enough) for switching from Hetzner

~~~
ashayh
Network partitioning is also a common occurrence on AWS, and people have to
plan for that.

~~~
matlock
Of course, but it happened with a regularity that just didn't work out for us
any more. Although it was definitely not the main issue to change.

So far though we haven't seen any of those problems on EC2 (or at least only
very very very few instances)

------
127001brewer
_Linode was out of the picture fast, as they do not provide per hour pricing._

I thought that Linode is competitively priced - is that a wrong assumption?
(What is the pricing of Amazon's EC2 per year compared to Linode's?)

~~~
ajitk
Recently stumbled upon very competitively priced DigitalOcean:
<https://www.digitalocean.com/price-comparison-chart>

They have APIs to manage on-demand instances as well.

~~~
matlock
Digital Ocean looks pretty sweet, but the advantages by going with EC2 for us
are a large number of different Instance Types we can use for every task we
have.

It provides us with a lot of flexibility on how to build our service.

~~~
ajitk
That is true. Amazon has been in cloud hosting space for a long time to cover
almost all areas required to run a server. I am rooting for competitors though
who could offer more services. That should bring interesting services and
drive down cost even further.

------
mp99e99
Dont forget www.atlantic.net/cloud fast io competitive price per sec billing
API etc

